The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

and dining room.”

      “The bedroom would have been more telling.”

      “We don’t have that many frequencies. And there’s a TV in the bedroom.”

      “Fine. What else?”

      Jammu opened the Probst file. Baxti’s Hindi scrawl made her blink. “First of all, he only uses non-union labor. There was a big legal fight back in the sixties. His chief attorney was Charles Wilson, Barbara’s father, now his father-in-law. That’s how they met. Probst’s employees have never been on strike. Union wages or better. Company insurance, disability, unemployment and retirement plans, some of which are unique in the business. It’s paternalism at its best. Probst isn’t any Vashni Lai. In fact he has a quote reputation unquote for personal involvement at all levels of the business.”

      “An eye to the personal.”

      “Ha ha. He’s currently chairman of Municipal Growth, term to run through next June. That’s important. Beyond that—Zoo Board member ’76 through present. Board member Botanical Gardens, East-West Gateway Coordinating Council. Sustaining membership in Channel 9. That isn’t so important. Splits his ticket, as they say. Baxti did some interesting fieldwork. Went through old newspapers, spoke with the man in the street—”

      “I wish I’d seen it.”

      “His English is improving. It seems the Globe-Democrat sees Probst as a saint of the American Way, rags to riches, a nobody in 1950, built the Arch in the sixties, along with the structural work on the stadium, and then quite a list of things. That’s also very significant.”

      “He spreads himself thin.”

      “Don’t we all.”

      Singh yawned. “And he’s really that important.”

      “Yes.” Jammu squinted in the clove smoke. “Don’t yawn at me. He’s first among equals at Municipal Growth, and they’re the people we’re working on if we want capital moving downtown. He’s nonpartisan and Christ-like in his incorruptibility. He’s a symbol. Have you been noticing how this city likes symbols?”

      “You mean the Arch?”

      “The Arch, the Veiled Prophet, the whole Spirit of St. Louis mythos. And Probst too, apparently. If only for the votes he’ll bring, we need him.”

      “When did you decide all this?”

      Jammu shrugged. “I hadn’t given him much thought until I spoke with Baxti last week. He’d just eliminated Probst’s dog, a first step towards putting Probst in the State—”

      “The State, yes.”

      “—although at this point it’s little more than bald terrorism. For what it’s worth, the operation was very neat.”

      “Yes?” Singh removed a speck of cigarette paper from his tongue, looked it over, and flicked it away.

      “Probst was out walking the dog. Baxti drove by in a van, and the dog chased him. He’d found a medical supply company that sold him the essence of a bitch in heat. He soaked a rag in the stuff and tied the rag in front of his rear axle.”

      “Probst wasn’t suspicious?”

      “Apparently not.”

      “What’s to stop him from buying another dog?”

      “Presumably Baxti would have arranged something for the next one too. You’ll have to rethink the theory here. One reason I’m giving you Probst is he didn’t seem to respond to the accident.”

      The phone rang. It was Randy Fitch, the mayor’s budget director, calling because he’d be late for his eight o’clock appointment, due to his having overslept. In a sweet, patient tone, Jammu assured him that she wasn’t inconvenienced. She hung up and said, “I wish you wouldn’t smoke those things in here.”

      Singh went to the window, opened it, and tossed the butt into the void. Faint river smells entered the room, and down below on Tucker Boulevard a bus roared into the Spruce Street intersection. Singh was orange in the sunlight. He seemed to be viewing a titanic explosion, coldly. “You know,” he said, “I was almost enjoying the work with Buzzy and Bevy.”

      “I’m sure you were.”

      “Buzz considers Probst and his wife good friends of his.”

      “Oh?”

      “The Probsts put up with Bev. I have the impression they’re ‘nice’ people. Loyal.”

      “Good. A pretty challenge for you.” Jammu placed the file in Singh’s hands. “But nothing fancy, you understand?”

      Singh nodded. “I understand.”

       2

      In 1870 St. Louis was America’s Fourth City. It was a booming rail center, the country’s leading inland port, a wholesaler for half a continent. Only New York, Philadelphia and Brooklyn had larger populations. Granted, there were newspapers in Chicago, a close Fifth, that claimed the 1870 census had counted as many as 90,000 nonexistent St. Louisans, and granted, they were right. But all cities are ideas, ultimately. They create themselves, and the rest of the world apprehends them or ignores them as it chooses.

      In 1875, with local prophets casting it as the nation’s natural capital, the eventual First City, St. Louis undertook to remove a major obstacle from its path. The obstacle was St. Louis County, the portion of Missouri to which the city nominally belonged. Without the city, St. Louis County was nothing—a broad stretch of farmland and forest in the crook of two rivers. But for decades the county had dominated city affairs by means of an archaic administrative body called the County Court. The Court’s seven “judges” were notoriously corrupt and insensitive to urban needs. A county farmer who wanted a new road built to his farm could buy one cheap for cash or votes. But if parks or streetlights were needed for the city’s common good, the Court had nothing to offer. To a young frontier town the Court’s parochialism had been frustrating; to the Fourth City, it was intolerable.

      A group of prominent local businessmen and lawyers persuaded the framers of a new Missouri state constitution to include provisions for civic reform. Despite harassment by the County Court, the group then drafted a scheme for the secession of St. Louis from St. Louis County, to be voted on by all county residents in August 1876.

      Pre-election criticism focussed on one element of the scheme in particular: the expansion of the city’s landholdings, in a kind of severance payment, from the current twenty-one square miles to sixty-one square miles. Countyites objected to the city’s proposed “theft” of county property. The Globe-Democrat denounced the unfairness of annexing “divers and sundry cornfields and melon patches and taxing them as city property.” But the scheme’s proponents insisted that the city needed the extra room for tomorrow’s parks and industry.

      In an election run by the County Court, voters narrowly rejected the secession scheme. There were cries of fraud. Activists had no trouble convincing a Circuit Court judge (one Louis Gottschalk, who had personally drafted the reform provisions for the 1875 constitution) to appoint a commission to investigate the election. In late December the commissioners reported their findings. The scheme had passed after all, by 1,253 votes. Immediately the city claimed its new land and adopted a new charter, and five months later the County Court, its appeals exhausted, dissolved itself.

      Time passed. Sixty-one square miles of land soon proved to be less ample than the secessionists had supposed. As early as 1900 the city was running out of space, and the county refused to give it more. Old industry fled the messes it had made. New industry settled in the county. In the thirties, poor black families arrived from the rural South, hastening the migration of whites to the suburbs. By 1940 the city’s population had begun to plummet, and its tax base to shrink. Stately old neighborhoods became