twelve. Not surprisingly, all were male, all attended Municipal Growth meetings, and most were chief executives with a strong hold on their stockholders. These were the men she “had to have.”
What she would do when she “had” them, when she had cured the city’s ills and risen above her role in the police department to become the Madam of the Mound City, she wouldn’t say. Right now she was concerned only with the means.
Fighting her enemies in Bombay and furthering the interests of her relatives, Jammu had developed the idea of a “State” in which a subject’s everyday consciousness became severely limited. The mildest version of the State, the one most readily managed in Bombay, exploited income-tax anxiety. To the lives of dozens of citizens whose thinking she wished to alter, Jammu had had the Bureau of Revenue bring horribly protracted tax audits. And when the subject had reached a state in which he lived and breathed and dreamed only taxes, she’d move in for the kill. She’d ask a favor the subject would ordinarily never dream of granting, force a blunder the subject six months earlier would not have committed, elicit an investment the subject should have had a hundred reasons not to make … The method couldn’t work miracles, of course. Jammu needed some sort of leverage initially. But often the leverage consisted of little more than the subject’s susceptibility to her charm.
The State had two advantages over more conventional forms of coercion. First, it was oblique. It arose in a quarter of the subject’s life unrelated to Jammu, to the police, and, often, to the public sphere in general. Second, it was flexible. Any situation could be developed, any weakness on the subject’s part. Jammu had transformed the dangerous Jehangir Kumar, a man who liked to drink, into an incorrigible alcoholic. When Mr. Vashni Lai, a man with recurring difficulties with his underpaid welders in Poona, had attempted to have Jammu unseated as commissioner, she’d given him a labor crisis, a bloody uprising which her own forces were called in to help quell. She’d taken liberals and made them guilt-stricken, taken bigots and turned them paranoid. She’d preyed on the worst fears of energetic businessmen by preventing them from sleeping, and on the gluttonous tendencies of one of her rival inspectors by sending him a zealous Bengali chef who cooked up a gallbladder operation and an early retirement. Singh personally had entered the life of a philanderer, a Surat millionaire who died not long after, and rendered him impotent in the service of Jammu’s Project Poori.
Given the interchangeability of corporate executives, Jammu insisted that her subjects in St. Louis remain functional. They had to stay in power, but with their faculties impaired. And it was here—looking for a path to the State, for a means of impairment – that Singh ran into the problem of Martin Probst.
Probst had no weaknesses.
He was viceless, honest, capable, and calm to the point of complacency. For a building contractor, his business record was unbelievably spotless. He bid only on projects for which there was a clear-cut need. He hired independent consultants to review his work. Every July he sent his employees an itemized accounting of company expenditures. The only enemies he had today were the labor unions he’d thwarted back in 1062—and the unions were no longer a factor in St. Louis politics.
Probst’s home life also seemed to be in order. Singh had overheard a few domestic tiffs, but they were nothing more than weeds, shallow-rooted, sprouting from seams in solid pavement. The tranquil image of Probst’s family was, in fact, what St. Louis seemed to admire most about him. Singh had gleaned an assortment of citations from the library of tapes that R. Gopal had been cataloguing for Jammu. In one, Mayor Pete Wesley was speaking with the treasurer of the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council.
WESLEY (+ R. Crawford, Sat 9/10, 10:15, City Hall)
PW: No, I haven’t talked to him yet. But I did see Barbara at the ball game on Thursday and I asked her if he’d given it any thought.
RC: At the ball game.
PW: Isn’t that something? If she was any other lady, you’d think she was nuts.
RC: Going alone, you mean.
PW: I don’t see how she pulls it off. Anybody else … Can you imagine seeing somebody like Betty Norris sitting by herself in the box seats?
RC: What did Barbara say?
PW: We talked for quite a while. I never actually found out how Martin feels, but she certainly had her mind made up.
RC: Which way?
PW: Oh, for. Definitely for. She’s a great little lady. And you know, for a small family, isn’t it amazing how often you run into them?
Ripley (Rolf, Audrey, Mon 9/5, 22:15)
AR: Doesn’t Luisa seem like one of those children that something could happen to? She was so sweet today. Everything’s so perfect about her, isn’t it hard not to think something terrible will happen? (Pause.) Like a doll you could break. (Pause.) Don’t you think?
RR: No.
Meisner (Chuck, Bea, Sat 9/10, 01:30)
CM: That was Martin. He wanted to make sure we made it home all right. (Pause.) I’m sure he couldn’t sleep till he’d called. (Pause.) Did I really look that drunk?
BM: We all did, Chuck.
CM: It’s funny how you don’t notice it so much with them. I mean, they make you comfortable.
BM: They’re a very special couple.
CM: They are. A very special couple.
It was unfortunate, Singh thought, that R. Gopal would no longer have time to sort these recorded conversations and put them into such a usable form. “I think we’re past that phase,” Jammu had said. “I have something else for Gopal.”
Murphy (Chester, Jane, Alvin, 9/19, 18:45)
JANE: Know who I saw today, Alvin? Luisa Probst. Remember her?
ALVN: (chewing) Sort of.
JANE: She’s turned into a very pretty girl.
ALVN: (chewing)
JANE: I thought it’d be nice if you called her up sometime. I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear from you.
ALVN: (chewing)
JANE: I’m just saying, it might be a nice thing to do.
ALVN: (chewing)
JANE: I remembered her as being a little chubby. I hadn’t seen her in, oh, three years. I never get to Webster Groves anymore. I see her mother all the time, though. (Pause.) I think it would be very, very nice if you gave her a call.
CHES: Drop it, Jane.
A very pretty girl. A special couple. Singh was careful not to infer that Probst’s lovely family contributed to his actual power in the city, but the family was obviously a source of unusual strength. Strength like this could amount to a weakness. Even Baxti had recognized this. In his summary he’d written:
UnCorrupted in 72, and worse.
(In 1972 someone on the Slum Removal Board had requested a kickback and Probst had gone to the press with the story.)
He is haveing no sins but morality. He will die: every man is moral. This is the key to this. Death in air. Step one: dogg. Step two: doghter. Step Three: wife. Patterne of loss. And standing a lone. He loving his dogge. Calling it petname. And no doge …???
This was Baxti’s inspirational mode. His informational, in Hindi, was somewhat easier to follow.
Singh closed the folder and glanced at the blurry pigeons on the skylight. Baxti was clumsy, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d started in the right direction. As a citizen of the West, Probst was a priori sentimental. In order to induce the State in him, it might be necessary only to accelerate the process of bereavement, to compress into three or four months the losses of twenty years. The events would be unconnected accidents, a “fatal streak,” as Baxti put it elsewhere. And the process could occur in increments,