The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

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СКАЧАТЬ metal, large fragments, crashing into cars.

      The far corner of the lot was an inferno of black smoke and orange flame. RC threw the door open, scraping it on the parking-stop, and ran to the VIP. The VIP was stretched out flat on the ground with his hands over his head. He was right on top of a grease puddle. The flames crackled and rumbled, some only visible as a wildness of air. RC could see that the inferno was none other than Mr. Hutchinson’s Lincoln. The front two-thirds of it was missing. Mr. Strom’s Regal lay on its side. Cars all around had lost windshields and windows.

      The sirens were already coming. RC looked around. In an agony of helplessness, he jumped up and down.

      The VIP stirred. RC knelt. “Man, are you all right?”

      The VIP nodded. His eyes were wide open.

      “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” RC said. “What happened?”

      “Nothing—”

      “Nothing?”

      “I saw nothing. It exploded.”

      “Jesus.” RC paused to consider the man’s probable religion and added, “No offense.”

      The air itself seemed to have generated police radio static. A fire truck pulled up. The firemen began spraying the carnage casually, men watering a giant lawn with giant hoses, before they even climbed off the truck. A squad car pulled off Olive Street and nearly ran over RC and the VIP. It braked urgently. Doors opened.

      “Are you in charge here?”

      RC looked up. The person who’d spoken was Jammu. “I park cars,” he said.

      “Is this man hurt?”

      “Far’s I can tell he isn’t.”

      RC followed Jammu with his eyes as she bent down over the VIP. What a small woman she was. Smaller than she ever looked in pictures. She wore a light gray trench coat. Her hair was loose and tucked behind her ears. Though only a welterweight himself, RC stared. Such a small little woman.

      The VIP struggled to his knees. The front of his suit was stamped with a large, creased grease stain.

      Jammu turned to RC. “Whose car was that?”

      “Mr. Hutchinson’s. He’s—”

      “I know who he is. How did it happen?”

      “No idea.”

      “What do you mean, no idea?”

      RC sweated. “I was trying to get this guy’s Skylark out of, you know, a tight spot. Next thing I know—”

      He told her everything he’d seen. He hadn’t seen anything. But she never took her eyes off him. He felt like he was being memorized. When he gave her his name and address she thanked him and, in leaving, brushed his wrist with her fingers. The skin burned. She walked over to the wreck, which was now smoldering and roped off by the cops. RC looked around helplessly again. He still didn’t know what to do. He noticed that the VIP and squad car had disappeared.

      The bad thing was, he’d put a dent in Cliff Quinlan’s fender. He knew without going to check. As a job, this joke was getting old, and RC wasn’t stupid. They were taking applications at the Police Academy.

      One-fifteen in the afternoon. Jammu stood at the window of a twenty-second-floor room in the Clarion Hotel and directed a yawn at the Peabody Coal and Continental Grain installations across the Mississippi. On the near side of the river, conventioning Jaycees in paper boaters straggled along the footpaths to the Arch. Jammu looked at the reflection of her guest in the window. Karam Bhandari was sitting on the end of the double bed peeling the foil off the bottle of Mumm’s between his legs. Bhandari was Jammu’s mother’s personal attorney and sometime spiritual advisor. Though he came from a family of Jains, he was all carnivore, his eyes lidded, his skin saurianly faceted. Jammu had never liked him, but she felt obliged to show him a good time in St. Louis. She’d let him detonate a bomb this morning.

      The cork popped. Bhandari brought two stemmed plastic glasses fizzing to the window. He’d changed his grease-stained shirt but not the undershirt, and the grease was seeping through onto the pinpoint cloth. He raised his glass and showed his sharp, small teeth. “To your endeavor,” he said.

      Jammu returned the toast with her eyebrows and drained her glass. Bhandari had a vested interest in her endeavor. If she was sleepy today (and she was), it was the aftereffect of their meeting in her office last night. Bhandari specialized in intractable silences and bad-tempered sighs. Maman had sent him over to inspect the management of her investments, to confer with Jammu and with Asha Hammaker, and, in her phrase, “to get a sense of the situation.” Maman had every right to send him, since she was dumping fourteen and a half million dollars into the St. Louis real-estate market and spending another five hundred thousand in silence money. But Bhandari was being hosted by Jammu, the very person whose judgment he had come to confirm or dispute. This made for tensions.

      “It’s quite impossible,” he’d said at one point. “You simply must have a full-time accountant.”

      “I’ve told you,” she said. “I have Singh, I have Asha’s—”

      “I see. May I ask why this—Mr. Singh—is not present this evening?”

      “Balwan Singh, Karam. You know Balwan. He’s in Illinois tonight.”

      “Oh. That Singh. He isn’t to be trusted, Essie. Surely there’s someone else.”

      “There’s Asha’s accountant and her attorneys, whom unfortunately she considered it unwise for you to meet. But Singh is very capable. And regardless of what Maman may have told you, he’s completely trustworthy.”

      Bhandari had pulled a long, dull donkey face, blinking. “Surely there’s someone else.”

      Returning now with the Mumm’s bottle, Bhandari reached around her and refilled her glass. His chin lingered at her shoulder. He was in a better mood today, since she’d let him do the bomb. She gave his cheek a filial pat. “Thanks, Karam.” She took a sip of champagne. “You have the transmitter?”

      He stepped back and fished in his jacket pocket, produced the transmitter and set it on the windowsill. “Yes. There it is.”

      A pause. The sky darkened a shade.

      “Is the transmitter your own work?”

      “The design is.”

      “And you still have time to be chief of police.”

      Jammu smiled. “It’s an old design. Standard issue.”

      “And the automobile?”

      “It belonged to a man named Hutchinson, the station’s general manager.”

      “And you attempt to extort, em, extort a certain – I take it this is an act of extortion?”

      “No. We make no demands.”

      A veil of rain drifted into view from the west, applying itself to the Arch. “No demands,” he repeated.

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