The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (64 page)

At 5:25 RC and Luzzi responded to a call from the offices of KSLX, where a group of street people were harassing employees as they left for home. Luzzi pulled the car around the police line blocking the inbound lanes of Olive Street and sped to the scene. Their arrival scattered the street people. They saw the soles of shoes flying up the alleys. A crowd of KSLX employees, many of whom RC recognized, dispersed and headed for the parking lot. Whoever was working the lot would have his hands full for a couple
of minutes. RC craned his neck and saw they now had a woman there doing the parking.

Luzzi spoke with the security guard and got back in the car. “Something about a Benjamin Brown,” he said.

“Huh.”

“Are you familiar with the individual?”

“It’s a name you hear.”

“If these people stick around and make trouble in the crowd tonight, they’ll be picked up separately. They aren’t local.”

“No, sir?”

Luzzi shook his head and jotted on his pad. “East St. Louis.”

“The root of all evil.”

“We’ve had enough of your humor, White.”

When Gopal failed to make his scheduled call at 4:00 and another hour passed without her phone ringing, Jammu began to worry, routinely. She wondered what had been going on in England in the last twenty-four hours. She wondered what was going on in St. Louis. If her phone didn’t ring she had no way of knowing. She called the Hammaker residence and found out nothing, called Singh’s place and got no answer. She tried Martin at his office.

“No,” his secretary said. “He left a while ago with Mrs. Probst.”

It took Jammu a moment to find her voice. “When was this?”

“Oh, three o’clock or so.”

“All right, thank you.”

Things had been too quiet.

Either Singh had released Barbara to destroy the operation, or else Devi had returned. Knowing Devi to be resourceful, Gopal to be punctual, and Singh to be loyal if not to her then at least to the operation, Jammu concluded that Mrs. Probst was Devi and that Gopal, her strong arm, quite possibly was dead.

Where was her authority now?

Jack came in the front door shaking his umbrella. His coat was a woolen carapace, a tall gray bell without tucks or flaps. Probst
looked up from the sofa with a smile, aware that his presence here was surprising. But Jack only nodded. “Hello Martin.” The pitch of his voice rose on the last syllable. A hint of angry tears.

Probst crossed the room and extended a hand. “Hi, Jack.”

“Good to see you.” Jack’s grip was weak. “What’s the occasion?”

“No occasion. Just thought I’d drop in.”

Jack wouldn’t look at him. “Great. Excuse me a second.” He swung around, and with a nonchalance undermined by little hitches in his stride, like the grabbing of a wet chamois on a windshield, he walked to the kitchen. He was obviously nursing a grudge. But perhaps he would abandon it. Probst sat down on the sofa again. He didn’t mind waiting. Waiting rooms were places in which it was impossible to think.

In the kitchen, where melted cheese had joined the hamburger and onions, there were murmured consultations. Probst had already accepted Elaine’s invitation to stay for dinner, and her murmurs were placating. Jack’s were upbraiding. Then hers became more heated, and Jack’s more resigned. He returned to the living room composing his hair and adjusting the cuffs of his baby blue sweater. “Do you want a beer, Martin?”

Again his voice rose as he spoke and cracked on the last syllable.

“Sure, thanks,” Probst said. “I’m not interrupting anything?”

Jack didn’t answer. He went to the kitchen and returned with a can of Hammaker, set it on the coffee table in front of Probst, turned on the television, and marched back to the kitchen. Probst was amazed. He never got the silent treatment from anyone but Barbara and Luisa.

“Oh, for pete’s sake, Jack.” Elaine was angry.

“…tonight as fire fighters from three communities continue to pour water on his three-story house, which burned to the ground late this afternoon. Cliff Quinlan has a live mini-cam report.”

“Don, no one knows how the fire started, Webster Groves fire chief Kirk McGraw has said it’s too early to speculate on the possibility of arson, I don’t think anyone here really thinks the blaze was in any way related to Probst’s recent political activities, but this has been a deadly fire. When Webster Groves fire fighters arrived, they witnessed a man believed to be Probst’s, ah, gardener
entering the house. He did not come out again. The intensity of the heat has made recovery of the body impossible thus far, and it may be another one to three hours before it’s determined whether any other persons were in the house at the time of the blaze. The one known victim is the, ah, gardener, who lived on the property and has not been seen. However, neighbors say that Probst’s car is not on the property, so it appears unlikely that he himself was in the house. I’ve asked Chief McGraw how a fire could burn out of control for as long as it did in this residential neighborhood.”

“Well, Cliff, first I’d have to point up the secluded nature of the residence, you see the hedges and the fence, the residence is set well back from the street, and at the period of time in question, namely the late afternoon, with visibility being what it was—”

Telephones rang throughout the house.

“Yes, he is,” Jack said in the kitchen. He appeared in the doorway. “Martin, it’s for you.” He pointed—jabbed—a finger at the phone on the console in the hall. Then he withdrew again to the kitchen.

Probst retrieved his coat from the closet and walked out the front door into the rain. He’d hardly recognized the Webster Groves scene on the news. But he could identify the phone call with certainty. It was the summons he’d been waiting for. Only Jammu would have thought to look for him here. He’d mentioned Jack to her once, and once, he was learning, was all she needed.

She woke up with a headache and some grogginess, but basically the substance he’d given her had treated her as gently as he himself had. For a while she lay breathing experimentally, accustoming herself to consciousness, expecting dinner. But when she shifted her legs and opened her eyes she saw that everything had changed. The fetter was gone, the sheets were clean, a big lamp with a shade stood on a dresser by a chair on which her clothes—

She’d nearly fainted. On her next try, she stood up in increments, raising her head gradually, as if placing it atop the statue of her body. She crossed the room and opened the door. The lock she’d heard turn so many times was gone. And now, where for all the weeks she’d been led to the bathroom she’d heard the unmis
takable echoes of vacancy, she was walking through an apartment very much like the New York apartment John had been forcing her to imagine.

Books of hers lay on the arms of Scandinavian chairs. She’d hung lingerie up to dry in the bathroom. On a desk in the dining room, above a pack of her Winstons and a dirty ashtray, she’d filed away her letters from Luisa and Audrey in a set of modular shelves. She’d stocked the refrigerator with her preferred brands of yogurt, diet chocolate soda, martini olives. (She was starving for real food, but she didn’t touch anything.) She’d written a grocery list and left it on the counter. On the floor near the outer door she found a scrap of white paper.

The nurses, orderlies and candy stripers gave Buzz a wide berth. In the waiting area on the ICU floor at Barnes he sat hunched and trembling, a small, hungry old man. He hadn’t eaten anything since his Reuben sandwich at noon. What the intercoms were saying he didn’t understand. A nurse manipulated jumbo file cards and a telephone pealed electronically. A thin, even layer of scar tissue covered the walls and floors, the residue of the artificial light that had been falling twenty-four hours a day for twenty years.

The chief neurologist had told Buzz that any brain damage would not become evident until Bev regained consciousness, but that he should begin to prepare himself for a long and arduous recovery period. Asha had told him, when he finally got in touch with her, that she wouldn’t be able to see him tonight because she’d made a commitment to appear at the election festivities downtown. And Martin’s phone wasn’t working.

Strain was building in his throat and behind his nose when he heard a familiar voice. He stifled a sob, looked up and saw his urologist strolling with another doctor at a conversational pace. Both of them peeled off green caps and massaged their scalps. Buzz raised his head further and uncrossed his arms to let himself be recognized
and spoken to. They didn’t speak to him. Dr. Thompson said, “Kids get side-aches.”

The other doctor said, “Kids eat candy.”

Dr. Thompson said, “Candy causes side-aches.”

Both men laughed and walked onto the elevator, which had opened for them as they approached it.

Tired of driving but not of moving, Probst parked the Lincoln in one of the Convention Center garages, counted five other cars on the entire Lemon level, and set out from there on foot. It was nine o’clock. He’d spent two hours at the police station in Webster Groves, speaking to Allstate, thanking firemen, accepting coffee and condolences from Chief Harrison, and giving information to a series of lesser officers who transferred his statements onto dotted lines. He was told there would soon be a body to identify. He was left by himself in a corridor to wait, gratefully, on a carved walnut bench. Then an officer called his name: he was wanted on the telephone. It was the second summons, and again he walked away, got in his car, drove east.