The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

to you tomorrow.”

      “All right. Good-bye.”

      Maman and Indira were blood relations, Kashmiri Brahmans, sharing a great-grandfather on the Nehru side. It was no coincidence that Jammu had been admitted to the Indian Police Service less than a year after Indira became prime minister. Once she was in the Service, no one had been ordered to promote her, of course, but occasional phone calls from the Ministry would let the pertinent officials know that her career was being watched “with interest.” Over the years she herself had received hundreds of calls similar in their vagueness, though more immediate in their concerns. A Maharashtra state legislator would express great interest in a particular prosecution, a Congress Party boss would express great distress over a particular opponent’s business dealings. Very seldom did a call originate from higher up than the governor’s office; Indira was a great student of detail, but only in curricular subjects. Like any entrenched leader, she made sure to place plenty of buffers between herself and questionable operations, and Jammu’s political operations had been questionable at best. The two of them had spoken privately only once—just after Jammu and her mother concocted Project Poori. Jammu flew to Delhi and spent seventy minutes in the garden of Madam’s residence on Safdarjang Road. Madam, in a canvas chair, watched Jammu closely, her brown eyes protuberant and her head turned slightly to one side, her lips curled in a smile that now and then made her gums click, a smile in which Jammu saw nothing but machinery. Shifting her gaze a quarter turn, towards a hedge of rosebushes behind which machine-gun muzzles sauntered, Madam spoke. “Please understand that this wholesaling project won’t work. You do understand that, you’re a sensible young woman. But we’re going to fund it anyway.”

      A shoe squeaked in Jammu’s outer office. She sat up straight. “Who’s—” She cleared her throat. “Who’s there?”

      Balwan Singh walked in. He was wearing pleated gray pants, a fitted white shirt, and an azure necktie with fine yellow stripes. His air was so competent and trustworthy that he scarcely needed to show his clearance papers to get upstairs. “It’s me,” he said. He set a white paper bag on Jammu’s desk.

      “You were eavesdropping.”

      “Me? Eavesdropping?” Singh walked to the windows. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and his light skin had received additional sunniness from some Middle Eastern ancestor. Only an old friend and ex-lover like Jammu could detect the moments when the grace of his movements passed over into swishiness. She still admired him as an ornament. For a man who up until July had been living in Dharavi squalor, he would have seemed remarkably—suspiciously—dapper if he hadn’t dressed exactly the same way among his so-called comrades in Bombay, whose tastes ran to velour and Dacron and sleazy knits. Singh was a marxist of the aesthetic variety, attracted to the notion of exportable revolution at least partly because Continental stylishness was exported along with it. His haberdasher was located on Marine Drive. Jammu had long suspected he’d forsaken Sikhism as a youth because he considered a beard disfiguring.

      Singh nodded at the paper bag on her desk. “There’s some breakfast if you want it.”

      She placed the bag on her lap and opened it. Inside were two chocolate doughnuts and a cup of coffee. “I was listening to some tapes,” she said. “Who put the mikes in the St. Louis Club bathrooms?”

      “I did.”

      “That’s what I thought. Baxti’s mikes sound like they’re wrapped in chewing gum. Yours do pretty well. I heard some useful exchanges. General Norris, Buzz Wismer—”

      “His wife is a terrible bitch,” Singh said absendy.

      “Wismer’s?”

      “Yes. ‘Bev’ is the name. Of all the women here who will never forgive Asha for marrying Sidney Hammaker, or Hammaker for marrying Asha—and there are a great many of these women—Bev is the nastiest.”

      “I’ve been hearing the same complaints on all the tapes,” Jammu said. “At least from the women. The men are more likely to say they’re ‘ambivalent’ about Asha. They keep referring to her intelligence.”

      “Meaning her bewitching beauty.”

      “And her fabulous wealth.”

      “Wismer, at any rate, is one of the ambivalent ones. Bev can’t stand it. She taunts him constantly.”

      Jammu dropped the lid from her coffee cup into the wastebasket. “Why does he put up with it?”

      “He’s strange. A shy genius.” Singh frowned and sat down on the windowsill. “I started hearing about Wismer jets twenty years ago. Nobody makes a better one.”

      “So?”

      “So he isn’t the man I expected. The voice is all wrong.”

      “You’ve been doing a lot of listening.”

      “A hundred fifty hours maybe. What do you think I do all day?”

      Jammu shrugged. She could be certain Singh wasn’t exaggerating the amount of time he’d spent on the job. He was studiously beyond reproach. With no distractions (except for an occasional blond boy) and no responsibilities (except to her), he had time to lead an ordered life. A precious life. She, who had a pair of jobs that each took sixty hours a week to perform, was no match for Singh when it came to details. Her foot began to tap of its own accord, which meant the Dexedrine was working. “I’m taking you off the Wismer case,” she said.

      “Oh yes?”

      “I’m putting you in charge of Martin Probst.”

      “All right.”

      “So you’re going to have to start all over. You can forget Wismer, forget your hundred fifty hours.”

      “That was just the tapes. Try three hundred.”

      “Baxti handed in Probst’s file. You start immediately.”

      “Is this something you only just decided?”

      “No, it is not. I already spoke to Baxti, he already handed in his file, that’s what you’re here for. To pick it up.”

      “Fine.”

      “So pick it up.” She nodded at a tea-stained folder by her desk lamp.

      Singh walked to the desk and picked it up. “Anything else?”

      “Yes. Put the file down.”

      He put it down.

      “Go get me a glass of water and turn up the heat in here.”

      He left the room.

      Martin Probst was the general contractor whose company had built the Gateway Arch. He was also chairman of Municipal Growth Inc., a benevolent organization consisting of the chief executives of the St. Louis area’s major corporations and financial institutions. Municipal Growth was a model of efficacy and an object of almost universal reverence. If someone needed sponsors for an urban renewal project, Municipal Growth found them. If a neighborhood opposed the construction of a highway, Municipal Growth paid for an impact study. If Jammu wanted to alter the power structure of metropolitan St. Louis, she had to contend with Municipal Growth.

      Singh returned with a Dixie cup. “Baxti is looking for new worlds to conquer?”

      “Get a chair and sit down.”

      He did so.

      “Baxti’s obviously only marginally competent, so why make an issue of it?”

      He shook a clove cigarette from a caramel-colored pack and struck a match, shielding the flame from a hypothetical breeze. “Because I don’t see why we’re switching.”

      “I guess you’ll just have to trust me.”

      “Guess so.”

      “I assume you know the basics already—Probst’s charming wife Barbara, their charming eighteen-year-old daughter Luisa.