The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

in the sixties. Efforts at urban renewal succeeded in attracting affluent county residents to a few select zones but did little to cure the city’s ills. Everyone worried about the city’s schools, but it was an exercise in hand wringing. The seventies became the Era of the Parking Lot, as acres of asphalt replaced half-vacant office buildings downtown.

      By now, of course, most American cities were in trouble. But compared with St. Louis, even Detroit looked like a teeming metropolis, even Cleveland like a safe place to raise a family. Other cities had options, good neighbors, a fighting chance. Philadelphia had land to work with. Pittsburgh could count on help from Allegheny County. Insular and constricted, St. Louis had by 1980 dwindled to America’s Twenty-Seventh City. Its population was 450,000, hardly half the 1930 figure.

      The local prophets were defensive. Where once they’d expected supremacy, they now took heart at any sign of survival. For forty years they’d been chanting: “St. Louis is going to make it.” They pointed to the Gateway Arch. (It was 630 feet tall; you couldn’t miss it.) They pointed to the new convention center, to three tall new buildings and two massive shopping complexes. To slum-clearance projects, to beautification programs, to plans for a Gateway Mall that would rival the mall in Washington.

      But cities are ideas. Imagine readers of The New York Times trying in 1984 to get a sense of St. Louis from afar. They might have seen the story about a new municipal ordinance that prohibited scavenging in garbage cans in residential neighborhoods. Or the story about the imminent shutdown of the ailing Globe-Democrat. Or the one about thieves dismantling old buildings at a rate of one a day, and selling the used bricks to out-of-state builders.

      Why us?

      Never conceding defeat, the prophets never asked. Nor did the old guiding spirits, whose good intentions had doomed the city; they’d moved their homes and operations to the county long ago. The question, if it arose at all, arose in silence, in the silence of the city’s empty streets and, more insistently, in the silence of the century separating a young St. Louis from a dead one. What becomes of a city no living person can remember, of an age whose passing no one survives to regret? Only St. Louis knew. Its fate was sealed within it, its special tragedy special nowhere else.

      After his meeting with Jammu, Singh took the heavy Probst file to his West End apartment, read the file’s contents, called Baxti eight times for clarifications, and then, the following morning, drove out to Webster Groves for a visit to the scene of future crimes.

      The Probsts lived in a three-story stucco house on a long, broad street called Sherwood Drive. Barbara Probst had driven off punctually. Tuesdays, like Thursdays, she worked in the acquisitions department of the St. Louis University Library, returning home at 5:30. Tuesday was also the gardener’s day off. When the beeping in Singh’s earphone had faded into static (Baxti had equipped Barbara’s BMW with a transmitter that had a range of one kilometer) he checked the two channels from the mikes inside the house and, finding everything quiet, approached on foot. During school hours pedestrians were as scarce on Sherwood Drive as in a cemetery.

      Singh was dressed approximately like a gas-meter reader. He carried a black leather shoulder bag. Ready in his pocket were surgical latex gloves for fingerprint protection. He descended the rear stairs and entered the basement with the key Baxti had given him. Looking around, he was impressed by the great quantity of junk. In particular, by the many bald tires, the many plastic flower pots, and the many coffee cans. He went upstairs to the kitchen. Here the air had the smell of recent redecoration, the composite aroma of new wallpaper, new fabrics, new caulking and new paint. A dishwasher throbbed in its drying cycle. Singh removed the screen from the heating register above the stove, replaced the battery in the transmitter, adjusted the gain of the mike (Baxti never failed not to do so), replaced the screen, and repeated the procedure for the transmitter in the dining room.

      Baxti had already gone through Probst’s study and Barbara’s desk and closets, the address books and cancelled checks and old correspondences, so Singh concentrated on the girl’s—Luisa’s – bedroom. He shot up six feet of microfilm, recording every document of interest. It was noon by the time he finished. He mopped his forehead with his shirtsleeve and opened a bag of M&M’s (they didn’t leave crumbs). He was chewing the last of them, two yellow ones, when he heard a familiar voice outside the house.

      He moved to a front window. Luisa was walking up the driveway with a female friend. Singh entered the nearest spare bedroom, pushed his shoulder bag under the bed, and slid in after it, stilling the dust ruffle just as the girls entered the kitchen below him. He switched channels on his receiver and listened to their movements. Without speaking, they were opening the refrigerator and cabinets, pouring liquids into glasses and handling plastic bags. “Don’t eat those,” Luisa said.

      “Why not?”

      “My mother notices things.”

      “What about these?”

      “We’d better not.”

      They came upstairs, passed the spare bedroom, and settled in Luisa’s room. Singh lay very still. Three hours later the girls tired of television and went outside with binoculars. Back at the front window, Singh watched them until they were a block away. Then he returned to the basement and came up the outside stairs jotting on his meter-reader’s pad.

      In his second apartment, in Brentwood, he developed and printed the film. He stayed inside this apartment for three nights and two days, reading the documents and working through some of the hundred-odd hours of Probst conversations recorded thus far. He warmed up frozen preprepared dinners. He drank tap water and took occasional naps.

      When Luisa went out on Friday night he was waiting on Lockwood Avenue in the green two-door LeSabre he’d leased two months ago. To himself, willfully, he gave the name its French pronunciation: LeSob. Luisa picked up four friends from four houses and drove to Forest Park, where they sat on—and rolled down, and scampered up, and trampled the grass of—a hill called Art. Art Hill. The museum overlooked it. When darkness fell, the youths drove ten miles southwest to a miniature golf course on Highway 366 called Mini-Links. Singh parked the LeSob across the road and studied the youths with his binoculars as they knocked colored balls through the base of a totem pole. The faces of the two boys were as soft and downy as those of the three girls. All of them giggled and swaggered in that happy ascendancy, repellent in any land, of teens on their turf.

      The next night, Saturday, Luisa and her school-skipping friend Stacy shared marijuana in a dark park and went to a soft-core pornographic movie, the pleasures of which Singh opted to forgo. On Sunday morning Luisa and a different girl loaded birdwatching equipment into the BMW and drove west. Singh followed no farther than the county limits. He’d seen enough.

      On the no man’s land bounded by the sinuous freeway access ramps of East St. Louis, Illinois, stood the storage warehouse in which Singh had a loft, his third and favorite apartment. Princess Asha had found it for him—the building numbered among the Hammaker Corporation’s real-estate holdings—and she had paid for the green carpeting in the three rooms, for the kitchen appliances and for the shower added to the bathroom. The loft had no windows, only skylights of frosted glass. The doors were made of steel. The walls were eleven feet high, fireproof and soundproof. Locked in the innermost room, Singh could be anywhere on earth. In other words, not in St. Louis. Hence the attraction of the place.

      A dim shadow of a pigeon fell on the skylight, and a second shadow joined it. Singh opened the Probst file, which lay near him on the floor. All week Jammu had been calling him, pressuring him to set in motion a plan to bring Probst into her camp. She was in a terrible hurry. Already, with the help of the mayor and a corrupted alderman, she was designing changes in the city tax laws, changes which the city could not afford to enact unless, in the meantime, some of the county’s wealth and population had been lured east again. But the county guarded its resources jealously. Nothing short of reunification with the city could induce it to help the city out. And since voters in the county were adamantly opposed to any form of cooperation, Singh and Jammu agreed that the only way to catalyze a reunification was to focus on the private individuals who did the shaping of policy in the region, who determined the location and tenor of investment. No more than a dozen catalysts were needed, according