Wireless

1

A good number of the old churches in Quinsigamond have found other uses. These big, dark houses of God have been turned into nightclubs and restaurants, a museum, a weight training salon, and these weird, upscale condos for the city’s nouveau riche Europhiles.

There was a big fad that peaked maybe five years back. Developers were grabbing the churches on the point of absolute decay, abandoned monsters whose parishioners had died out or moved on. For a while, every hustler with a real estate license was trying to find a way to target St. Brendan’s, Quinsigamond’s only cathedral. But the diocese held out, the bishop refused all offers. St. Brendan’s was still a legitimate parish, even if the bulk of its worshipers were outpatients from Toth Care Facility, tethered to their pews by a pocketful of lithium.

Now the market’s gone bad and more than one builder has filed Chapter 11. St. Brendan’s looks like it’s outlasted another trend. Speer sits in his car in the church lot and stares up at the structure. How could they want to desecrate such a thing?

To Speer, the cathedral is an architectural miracle with only one function — the singular glorification of the one true God. Whoever drafted the plans had to have been divinely inspired. This is the only explanation that makes sense, that offers a justification for the majesty that springs up from a common gravelly lot in the heart of downtown.

The church is almost a hundred and fifty years old, a monument to the tenacity of gray granite. It’s a traditional nave-and-transept setup, but its centerpiece is a square tower that rises up in stages of arched windows and concludes with castlelike buttresses at each corner. The tower gives the cathedral the look of a fortress, a bastion of strength that could hold off a lifetime of heresy.

Speer instinctively senses, but has no respect for, the irony of what’s happened to this church; the fact that this living artwork and testament to the possibilities of a honed Christian mind should become the stamping ground for the refuse of society. It sickens him these days when he watches the kinds of people who climb the granite stairs to make a visit. There are the dozens of street folk, the deinstitutionalized peasants who live in the alleys and cellar holes off Main Street. There are the drunks and addicts who fixate on some childhood, addlebrained idea of Christ. There are the last remnants of the old neighborhood, the elderly who never moved on and now haunt the cathedral with their walkers and canes. And there are the rapidly growing clans of immigrants, the majority illegal. Speer calls these people the mutants. He thinks they’re the product of some awful recessive gene that condemned certain countries to a continual backwardness. They are the bottom of the DNA barrel, but nature has seen fit to give them wild breeding abilities, and so they explode beyond their natural boundaries. Every time some petty despot seizes their homeland, they run to America to live the parasite’s dream.

They are Hispanic and Indian and, more and more often, any one of a variety of the Asian tribes — Laotian, Vietnamese, a slew of Cambodians. The federal and state governments help them buy the dilapidated tenements packed into the center of town, and then literally dozens move in, five to a bedroom, people sleeping on tables. They bring the aunts, the uncles, the cousins and in-laws over on the next freighter. They raise chickens in the kitchen cabinets and practice unspeakable religious rites on the back porch.

Except for the converts, the ones Father Todorov has gone to great pains to win over. This is what you want as the future of Catholicism, Speer thinks, and bites down on his back teeth. He finds the name Todorov particularly suspect. It sounds Russian and they’ve got their own very insular rite— Russian Orthodox, out of old Constantinople. Speer has read a book on the history of schism in the church. Splinters from the Rock, by an ex-Jesuit named Bloom. He couldn’t get a handle on where the author’s heart lay. But he does know that the modern toleration of heretical thought could be the end of the only true route to God.

There was Todorov just last week allowing a Lutheran minister onto the St. Brendan’s altar to read the gospel. A show of ecumenism. A display of understanding. And a two-column photo in the religion section of the Spy. Todorov has been pulling down more than his share of press lately. Last summer, when no one was looking and half the chancery was playing golf on Cape Cod, the good father starts up his own radio hour on QSG. The Word Made Flesh. His initial broadcast was exactly what Speer expected, an apologia for Liberation Theology and Marxist Clerics. But grudgingly, Speer had to acknowledge the man had classic radio skills, a natural heir to Fulton Sheen, not a trace of an accent, never a stammer or cough, and always building to commercial-time climaxes.

And now Fr. T’s latest crusade is the city’s mounting gang problem. He explained it on last week’s show as a “natural outgrowth of a morally reprehensible foreign policy.” Speer was glued to the radio, both disgusted and fascinated by the bizarre progression of the priest’s logic, his proposition that American support for “genocidal tyrants around the world” has “bred a violent mind-set” among the “global peasantry, the fellaheen.” The peasants seek sanctuary in our urban cesspools and “bind into the only form of security they’ve been allowed to know — the gang system, the tribal rite.”

Speer wonders—where did this guy learn to talk this way?

So now the priest tries to play big brother to the dozens of immigrant packs attempting to carve out a block or two for themselves in their new home. One day he’s down bringing donated food to the Haitian Tonton Loas. The next, it’s government cheese to the Castlebar Road Boys, drug-running IRA punks. In the meantime, all this street trash with their coded tattoos and colors are muling skag and doing drive-by clubhouse hits.

Speer thinks that throughout human history, more damage has been done by misguided men than by those with consciously heinous intent. He thinks that maybe the worst sin of all is the sin of confusion. He thinks that on their first day in the seminary, all novitiates should have a quote branded onto their chests, backward, like the ignorant cattle they are. Then each morning they could rise and look in the mirror and read the words that lie on the skin above their heart: I would not even believe in the Gospels were the Holy Church to forbid it — Francis Xavier.

Todorov clearly doesn’t see the danger of his actions. He views himself as a man with a mission, maybe a destiny to fulfill. The horror is that he’s giving these heathen scum some degree of credibility, making the public see them as a genuine collective, an organized force to be dealt with rather than a minor, excisable exception to the rules of order and progress.

Speer knows the gang boys in ways Fr. Todorov never will. He knows them as aberrations, throwbacks to the pack mind of wild dogs, dim-witted, overstimulated, unsure of what they need or want and striking wildly at whatever comes their way.

This is the kind of vile scum Todorov wants to bring into the Church.

To save.

Speer wants to place firm hands on the priest’s shoulders and explain slowly, “There is nothing to save. This is basic theology. Look at the faces. Look at the features. Animals. Beasts of the earth. And as such, they have no souls.”

Speer puts his hand in his coat pocket, touches the canister, finds two loose Excedrin, pulls them out, and puts them in his mouth. The headache is probably too far gone now, but he dry-swallows the caplets anyway.

Todorov isn’t a stupid man. Why can’t he see the simple fact that following the fringe, following after the aberration, will always lead down a blind alley? The only explanation for the priest’s actions is the sin of vanity, the vice of raging ego. Pride will always make the brain lie to the soul. Todorov wants to be a shepherd so badly he’s tending to a flock of serpents.

Speer looks up and sees fewer people exiting the cathedral. He glances to his watch and sees confessions are just about over, so he gets out of the car, crosses the street, and enters through the enormous, castlelike front doors.

He stands in the doorway for a moment and lets his eyes adjust to the dimness. He moves to a small table set next to the St. Vincent de Paul Society collection boxes and picks up a mimeographed flier. It takes him a second to realize it’s written in Spanish.

He walks through a second set of double swinging doors into the main body of the cathedral. He slides into the last pew, kneels, folds his hands in prayer, and starts to take inventory. To his left is an elderly couple kneeling in a pew next to the confessional booth. And far to the front, up at the altar, is a large-bodied nun in a reformed habit, folding fresh white linen cloths. Speer scans the whole scene again.

He grew up in churches like this one. Smaller versions, but always built of heavy stone, like the cathedral, always ornate rather than quaint, with long aisles and cold, shadowy choir lofts, and a dark, smoky tinge to the walls where the heating system would push dust and grime upward year after year. Places where every word echoed and threatened to end up unintelligible.

Speer grew up dreaming of overseeing a place like this, four or five curates under his domain, maybe a crowded school staffed by classic disciplinarian nuns, enormous May Processions spilling out into the streets, and local politicians sniffing around each year for a vague endorsement. Three months in the seminary severed any hopes of fulfilling that dream. He found the core dogma of the institution had been subverted. And he knew that once that happens, the cancers of compromise and rationalization spread like an unbroken line of oil fires down the landscape.

Speer left the seminary and signed on with the FBI.

The nun on the altar folds and smooths her last piece of linen and exits into the sacristy. A few moments later the older couple finish praying their penance simultaneously, slide out of the pew, and leave. And Speer is alone with the priest.

There’s the sound of a cough and then Todorov appears from the sacristy, a set of keys in his hand, ready to lock up the church now that all the Masses are done.

Speer gives a hesitant voice and says, “Are you leaving, Father?”

Todorov squints down toward the rear of the church, then smiles and says, “Can I help you with something?”

He starts down the aisle toward Speer, and Speer moves his head around sheepishly and motions with one hand toward the confessional booth.

The priest pauses. “Do you want to …” He trails off and mimics the motion with his keys.

“If it’s not too much trouble,” Speer says.

“Not at all.”

Speer waits and allows the priest to enter the box, then moves out of his pew, steps in the adjoining booth, and pulls the heavy curtain closed behind him. He goes down on the cushioned kneeler, waits a beat, and then hears that old sound, that childhood sound of the miniature door, the sliding panel being pushed open to reveal the shadowed face of the priest, in profile, his ear turned to the penitent, obscured behind a heavy mesh.

The sound and the sight take Speer back for a moment, catch him off guard.

Fr. Todorov says, “Go ahead, my brother.”

And Speer instinctively begins speaking in a low, rote voice. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been—”

Another pause and then an improvisation. “—an awfully long time since my last confession and these are my sins.”

He stops. Todorov gives him a good ten seconds, then says, “It’s all right, son. Remember why we’re here. God has infinite forgiveness.”

“You truly believe that, Father?”

Speer can almost see the priest smile on the other side of the mesh. “With all my heart, my friend. That’s the root of all my faith.”

“But you’ve made a very broad statement, Father.”

“How is that?”

“What I mean is, is forgiveness the same as redemption?”

“I’m not sure I’m—”

“I’m speaking about the unconverted, Father. I’m talking about those outside the Faith. I’m asking you, can they be redeemed?”

“Are you trying to tell me you’re not Catholic? Is that—”

“Excuse me, Father, but, in this day and age, what would you mean by Catholic?”

Now Todorov pauses, backs away from the confessional screen, seems to put a hand up to his face.

“Well, very simply, were you ever baptized in the Catholic Church?”

“Is that necessary, Father?”

“Necessary? I’m not sure … I’m not sure we’re on the same track here. Did you want to make a confession?”

“It’s just that I’ve been following your work, Father. You’ve been in the Spy quite a bit lately. And I’m just wondering what it is you tell the heathens—”

Now Todorov interrupts, his tone turning sharp, his torso leaning back to the screen. “Heathens?”

“The gang boys. The Tonton Loas. The Angkor Hyenas. The Granada Street Popes.”

“I’m not sure we’re in the right place to—”

“Of course you’re right, Father. It’s just that your work, what I’ve read about, the things I’ve heard — it’s all caused me to rethink certain … Well, it has relevance to my confession, you see.”

The priest is curious now, maybe on the verge of being flattered. “Go on.”

“It’s just that, Father, the things I’ve done … It’s very difficult to … I’m very ashamed …”

Todorov is in his element now. His voice turns professional, a brother to his radio voice. “God’s brought you here today for a reason, don’t you think? We can’t change the past, my friend, but we can repent. That’s why you’re here. There are things you want to tell me, yes?”

“Yes, there are, Father.”

“Yes, there are. Now, you take a deep breath and you let the Spirit move you.”

“It’s very difficult, Father—”

“God will give you the strength. Tell me your story:”

Speer begins to whisper in a voice too soft to be heard. Todorov says, “If you could just speak up a bit, my friend.”

Speer sees the priest lean his ear toward the screen. The buck knife comes up and slashes the mesh diagonally. Speer’s free fist flies through the opening, catches the priest in the eye, breaks open skin. His hand grabs hold of Todorov’s throat and pulls the priest’s head through, into the penitents’ booth. Before the priest can scream, Speer has a full arm around his neck and the blade to his throat.

“I’ll have your tongue on the floor before you can make a fucking sound.”

The priest starts to let out small, panicky gasps that immediately evolve into a wet gurgle.

“I want you to know what you’ve done. I want you to realize what your actions have brought you. I hope God can have more mercy on you than I.”

Speer brings the knife down, pockets it, and draws from his jacket a small silver metal cylinder about the size of a hip flask. He holds it up in front of the priest’s face, actually touches the man’s forehead with it like some kind of quick anointing.

“This is benzine.”

He brings the canister up to his mouth, grips the cap with his teeth, unscrews the top, and spits the cap to the floor.

“The Nigerians used to be crazy for this stuff a while back. Warring tribes used to pour it over their captives. Made for an unbelievable sight. A man on fire with this shit — it isn’t like he just burns. This is like rocket fuel, okay? You explode.”

Todorov makes a single frantic pull backward, a seizure-like move of absolute panic. Speer tightens his grip on the neck and begins to pour the benzine over the top of the priest’s head.

“Just like baptism, Father.”

He empties the canister and drops it.

“Coincidentally, you know who’s big on benzine death these days? That’s right. Your own little Hyenas, there. The little Cambodian fuckers. It’ll look like you and the Hyenas had a disagreement. But that was bound to happen.”

Speer gets ready, takes a breath, then lets another punch fly, connects at the bridge of the priest’s nose, hears the bone break. At the same time he releases his hold and Todorov’s head shoots backward, back into the confessor’s booth.

In a single, graceful motion, Speer swings out of the confessional, grabs his Zippo lighter from his jacket, thumbs up a flame, and tosses the lighter in on top of Todorov. There’s an explosive sound of air popping, a gustlike rush of noise that increases in volume and chokes out any scream as the priest’s body tumbles sideways out into the church, immediately unrecognizable, a crumbling tower of blue-green flame, an inferno of dizzying incineration of flesh, hair, fabric, and then, in seconds, bone, calcium, muscle, and marrow. It’s like staring into the corner of a canvas that depicts the lowest and most brutal level of hell, blown up into a close-up and made animate. Todorov’s body stops moving. The curtain of the confessional is transformed into blue flames. The worn carpeting starts to burn below the pile of imploding cleric. The wood of the confessional booth catches. It’s a species of burning, a breed of fire that most people never get a chance to see.

But Speer is already in his car and pulling onto Harrington Street, a new Torquemada in a Ford sedan, a rush playing through his body like a pure bolt of speed, as if the glands of some raging god have been planted at the base of his spine. And a small buzz starts up in his ear like a brilliant insect, congratulating him on his step over the line, on his entry into the world of action.

2

Wireless, despite its name, did not set out to become a meeting place for the city’s radio freaks, though its owners, Mr. Ferrie and Mr. Most, were both longtime broadcast buffs. They’d met locally, over at Jonas University, and spent four years together, locked inside the college station, restaging a lot of the pretelevision radio gags that had been popular in their parents’ era: d.j.’s on the air a week without sleep, ridiculous and endless fake interviews, “Louie, Louie” played for forty-eight hours nonstop.

They took the inevitable step over the line when, a week after the Kent State killings, they ran a mock War of the Worlds-type all-day news report concerning the seizure of the campus by fatigue-clad CIA commandos reporting solely to Spiro Agnew, and the subsequent courtyard execution, relayed in graphic blood-spurting detail, of the student newspaper editor, the women’s collective coordinator, and two-thirds of the philosophy department.

The dean’s office was not amused. Ferrie and Most were suspended for the balance of their final semester and never bothered going back for their degrees. With time on their hands and few employment prospects, they borrowed money from their parents and purchased a condemned 1920s lunch car that was oddly attached to a condemned former factory.

Their hope was to round up some hands-off investors and turn the place into Quinsigamond’s first cutting-edge, independent, underground radio station. The first prospective financiers didn’t stay long after it was revealed that the station would program, in Feme’s own words, “dramatic readings from the works of Herbert Marcuse — right alongside only the purest R&B.” Furthermore, they’d accept no commercial advertising. At this point one possible investor, an uncle of Most’s back in Newark, shook his head, confused, and asked, “No advertising? Where do I get my return?”

Ferrie and Most shook their heads back at him and said in unison, both their voices rising in pitch to accent the word’s last syllable, “Return?”

As the uncle threw them out of his home, Ferrie made an improvised pitch that they’d sell their blood on a regular basis.

Instead, they scrapped the radio station idea and reopened the diner as a diner. They cleaned the lunch car and fashioned enough Mickey Mouse repairs to placate the licensing board and, surprisingly, during the first month of operation, found they’d stumbled into the right market — blue plate specials for a blue-collar town. Neither was an expert chef, but they borrowed family recipes for meat loaf and chili and turned a modest and, at the time, somewhat embarrassing profit the first year.

Ferrie shocked himself by realizing he had a facility for business. Most uncovered a latent flair for design. They reinvested continually, eventually bought the ruined factory building grafted to their rear. They expanded, renovated the dim mill that had spun a century’s worth of machine parts from the sweat of immigrant labor. By the late seventies, the partners drifted onto the dangerous precipice of late-night hipness, and became nightclub mavens. They scored a liquor license, contracted live bands, sculpted a hazy-neon backstreet motif, suspended huge, original, local artwork on the now-chic exposed-brick walls. And Wireless became a certified hot spot.

Today, people pulling into the crushed-stone parking lot at 10 P.M., letting their headlights play off the unique structure gleaming deep-colored light and literally humming with an electric buzz, have a tendency to indulge in hindsight and state, “The place couldn’t miss.” But Ferrie and Most would be the first to tell anyone their fortunes rose on the uncontrolled tides of luck and weird social fads.

In their adjoining offices above the dance floor, they keep on the wall, framed in acid-proof matte and imported wood, lit by glareless, recessed lighting, color snapshots of the diner and factory as they existed on the day the partners took title: filthy and falling down, an occasional grave for junkies and derelicts, a nest for urban wild dogs, a fire trap, a blight on the landscape calling out for a John Deere bulldozer. Next to these are shots of the building as it exists today — sandblasted clean, hauled into the future without destroying the feel and look of the past.

In its present, pristine state, something about Wireless looks almost unreal, as if it were the product of Hollywood set designers and special-effects wizards. There’s a weird glow that seems to emanate from the diner when you see it from a distance, sitting at the end of the long, dead-end, gravel road. It looks like a streamlined train car designed by men drunk with optimism, crazed with hope for a future of limitless progress where technology paid as much heed to aesthetics as functionality. The diner always seems ready to lurch into motion, to start a frantic but absolutely smooth charge down a set of invisible tracks, powered not by steam or diesel or electricity, but rather by the sheer spectacle and insistence of the neon light that runs in sleek, flowing tubes along the edges of the structure.

The neon is a Halloween orange and it culminates on the roof of the lunch car where deco letters spell out the word DINER. Piggyback above the DINER sign is a huge deco-style capital letter G that gleams in yellow neon. A lot of the regulars are convinced the G has some special significance, that Ferrie and Most have coded some cryptic meaning into a single letter of the alphabet. But in fact, the G merely stands for the original diner owner’s name — Lennie Grimoire. Ferrie and Most could make that fact public and put an end to the rampant speculation and betting. But they live for exactly that air of vagueness and mystery and so the yellow-neon G is allowed to stand for everyone’s wildest interpretation.

The front wall of the diner is made of baked porcelain painted a forest green with canary-yellow block letters that read WIRELESS and at either end announce Tables for Ladies. Above the lettering are an even dozen double-pane windows with gilt trim. The roof is accentuated by a small stainless-steel lip that gives just a touch of overhang and shades the windows.

Inside is all marble and chrome and stainless steel, offset by more neon and wooden paddle fans, deco-tiled floor, polished oak walls, and muted purple and blue spotlights. The lunch car section of the building features the original black-veined marble counter that stretches for fifteen feet with a dozen chrome and Naugahyde stools bolted to the floor behind a long brass foot rail. Behind the stools are a dozen booths with plasticized leather covering over solid-wood frames. The lunch car serves some simple dishes, standard diner food — chili, stews, an occasional goulash. The dishes sit in steam wells and fill the room with a distinctive but unidentifiable aroma.

Where the diner gives way to the interior of the old factory is where Ferrie and Most let their imaginations start to run free. Inside the brick caverns that extend backward behind the lunch car, all rules of design logic were allowed to be broken. There is no grand plan, no underlying theme to the interior of Wireless. Ferrie and Most worked slowly and instinctively in putting their world together. They filled up factory space piecemeal, as the money came in. They rustled the decor from a wide variety of sectors. One week they’d scavenge from flea markets all over New England, the next they’d pay top dollar just for the right to bid at an unannounced auction in a Manhattan gallery. They bought close-out merchandise from salvage companies. They purchased mail-order from weird trade magazines. They bartered and swapped and got involved in drawn-out installment sales on items no one could imagine them needing in the first place.

But the items always fit in with such symmetry and style that now it seems like Ferrie and Most were born master-minds of intricate design and placement. And they’ve given up on trying to convince anyone otherwise. Who could accept their protestations that everything in Wireless simply gave off a vibration? That it was the items that bagged the owners and not the other way around.

The building is now as crowded as a Victorian china cabinet. There are barber chairs occupied by full human skeletons that were donated by a couple of med school dropouts in exchange for a “regular’s” table in the diner. There are three perfectly restored, chrome-festooned Harley-Davidsons impaled through their seats by carousel poles and suspended in midair like some carnival ride for monster children. There’s the front end of a 1961 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud II coupe that appears to have crashed through a sidewall, though closer inspection reveals that the loose bricks and mortar on the hood and floor are cemented in place. Next to this frozen collision is an authentic old fire-engine-red gasoline pump that one regular has customized so that a press of the nozzle dispenses what rumor purports to be a blast of nitrous oxide but what is, in fact, merely pure oxygen.

In the rear of the factory, in a section the regulars call Minnesota, is the billiards room. It includes a high wall of reference books solely devoted to radio. Some of the books are intricate manuals and others are memoirs and nostalgia from the entertainment field, but all chronicle Ferrie and Most’s lifelong obsession.

The billiards tables are actually five genuine caskets, sold at cost by an undertaker named Frankie Loftus. A couple of self-styled cabinetmakers went to work on them one day and produced a weird new version of bumper pool complete with sawed-off cues and smaller but denser pool balls. The exposed-brick walls of Minnesota are hung with framed photos of radio legends from bygone days: Major Kord, Cowboy Slim Rinehart, Rose Dawn, Paul Kallinger, and J. C. Bishop.

But most of all, inside Wireless you find radios. They’re everywhere. Crosleys, Philcos, Farnsworths, G.E.’s. Running exactly down the center of the factory are a series of floor-to-ceiling brick pillars that serve to buttress the roof. The sturdier waist-high cabinet radios are positioned around these supports like deco altars, as if the nightclub were a cathedral where each priest had his own blessed platform for performing a complex rite. The smaller, rarer models are placed on display shelves, like royal jewels or the bones of saints, underneath arcing acrylic domes. Each booth in Wireless comes equipped with its own radio done up to look like a 1950s chrome-sided, bubble-faced mini-juke.

From the start, Ferrie and Most’s shrine to radios and weirdness brought in the crowds — the curious as well as the hard core. They pumped a good cut of their profits back into the machine, kept reinvesting in atmosphere, always giving the customers more of a taste, continually upgrading their tickets to a semi-alien milieu. The process kept paying off.

Though they stumbled into the club-owner life — all tailored Italian suits and a closet just for footwear; imported two-seat cars and annual winter trips to the Caribbean — Ferrie and Most never lost their love for radio. In a prominent corner of Wireless, up on a platform that some regulars call the Shrine, they installed an original, perfect-condition, still-functional forty-one-inch-tall Stewart-Warner cabinet model with the patented Magic Keyboard tuner. But despite this beautiful receiver, they could only pick up the same, common commercial broadcasts as anyone else. Until one night when Ferrie went down in the basement to bring up a fresh case of Dewar’s, stumbled over some leftover equipment Most had stored there years before, forgot the Scotch, and hauled up a crate of dust-blanketed microphones, amplifiers, turntables, and speakers. He found an empty booth, dumped the stuff on the table, and began hooking up. His enthusiasm caught on immediately and within the hour someone had unplugged the Stewart-Warner and the club owners were sitting opposite each other, their mouths hidden by fat Electrovoice mikes, doing a show that was limited to the interior of Wireless.

But that limited audience was enough to bring back to Ferrie and Most a lost joy. Their improvised interplay had a manic quality to it. They seemed to share one set of brain waves when they were on the air. They could finish sentences for each other, come up with brilliant punch lines for on-the-spot jokes. They played rare, sometimes bootleg R&B gems between gabtime. They editorialized, prophesied, lampooned, became passionate in an odd, endearing way.

It was sometimes as if some extra, unnatural current ran between both microphones and into the hands of the men on opposite sides of the booth, some occultish line of mystery that pulled them into sync, meshed their subconscious thoughts, time-shared neurons and synapses, twinned dreams for mutual consumption. The growing cast of regulars at Wireless could feel it, but resisted speaking about it, as if they wanted to guard it, nurture it, and make it into an unspoken cult of electrical storytelling.

But like all cults, word of its existence leaked outside the borders of the diner and mill walls, and the like-minded — radio freaks of one form of another — began to gather. There were the techno-heads, people usually into shortwave and the textbook theories behind its practice. There were the nighthawks, people who only seemed to feel connected to other pockets of humanity when those pockets were perceived at 4 A.M. in a darkened room as detached and very laid-back voices drifting out of a pillow speaker. There were some d.j. groupies, some straight, simple R&B fans, some C.B. folk who loved to listen to the logistical reports of long-distance truckers, some New Wave rejects from the artsy Canal Zone who were into “random radio noise.” And there were the jammers.

The Wireless regulars knew of the jammers’ existence almost at once, but a strange taboo was in place from the start: you don’t rat on jammers. There wasn’t much logic behind the dictum. Jammers, by their very nature, represented opposition to, maybe destruction of, the exact medium that gave radio freaks value and meaning in their lives. But logical or not, the jammers were not only tolerated but fully accepted. Possibly they were considered the problemsome black sheep of an already somewhat ostracized family — the prodigal sons and daughters who, though you knew they were going to drain your wallet, break your heart, maybe rupture the very idea of Family that you cherished so much, you helped and protected and endured. Ferrie and Most knew instinctively that logic was not a key strand in the net that bound families — even the most oddly connected and fragile — together.

There was also an appealing aura that jammers seemed to give off when they weren’t obsessively concerned about remaining hidden, “deep in average-cover,” as Wallace Browning said, in “mole-mode,” as G.T. Flynn referred to it. Outside the solitude of their own homes, their hidden jamming stations and disruption rooms, the loosest a jammer could be was at Wireless. When their guards came down, even slightly, they let show just how noble and dangerous and frontline they thought their avocation was. And out of that attitude came a visible surety — not quite a cockiness, but more an assurance of self-worth that was vaguely manifested in their appearance or demeanor. They could throw on their oldest clothing and look hip and pricy. They could preach memorable sermons with the slight turning of eyes and tightening of the mouth. And they seemed to have an edge in the seduction department.

This is close to what Flynn is thinking, standing out in the parking lot, leaning against his car and taking in the beauty of the whole place and peering in a window, watching Hazel cadge drinks from a pair of college-boy d.j.’s with pockets of New York cash.

Is there anyone who knows how old Hazel really is? Best guesses range somewhere around the early twenties, but few of the regulars have ever seen her outside of Wireless and it’s hard to get a good look at her face in the dim blue light of the bar.

Hazel was one of the first jammers to start hanging at the bar, right after G.T. and before Wallace, though Wallace doesn’t really hang, just uses the place like a 3-D bulletin board. Hazel spends a lot of time teasing the curious newcomers. She allows rumors to spread, sometimes starts them herself. No one except Flynn knows what her day job is, if she has one. Some say hairdresser — based, most likely, on the several different colors and styles she might move through in a given season. Some say stewardess, since she tends to disappear for days at a time and has been seen drinking those tiny nip-bottles of airplane booze in the rest room. If Ferrie and Most know, they’re not telling.

Flynn probably knows more about Hazel than anyone else and that’s not a lot. He knows she was married once, a teenage romance that didn’t last the year. He once heard about a child put up for adoption, a boy that lives somewhere in the county.

A Volvo pulls up in front of him and Flynn smiles, leans to the car window, and says, “I thought you two would’ve taken home half the gold by now.”

Behind the wheel, Wallace Browning rolls his eyes. “We’re running late, as usual,” he says.

Browning’s wife, Olga, leans over and says, “Wish us luck, G.T.”

Flynn reaches in the window and grabs Olga’s hand. “You two don’t need luck, my friend. You’ve got magic feet.” He glances down to the floor, always intrigued by the customized pedals on the Volvo.

Wallace and Olga are both dwarfs. They each stand about three feet tall, but that doesn’t prevent them from being two of the most graceful and imaginative ballroom dancers Flynn has ever seen.

Wallace leans his head out the window a bit and whispers, “Did you talk to the problem child yet?”

Flynn sighs and shakes his head, a little annoyed. “I just got here, Wallace. The night is young.”

The dwarf makes a mild hissing noise. His voice rises and he says, “Mark my words, G.T. If we don’t—”

Flynn cuts him off with a pat on the arm.

“Wallace, leave the situation to me, okay? I’ll handle this. There’s no need to worry. You two get out of here and have a good time. Win one for your favorite life agent.” He shifts his head to see Olga. “Don’t let this guy slow you down, Olga. You look gorgeous, by the way.”

“We need to talk soon,” Wallace mutters, and shifts the car into drive.

“You worry too much,” Flynn says, and squeezes Browning’s shoulder. Then he steps back and watches the Volvo ease out of the lot.

Whenever he sees Wallace wearing that classic 1940s tuxedo, Flynn can’t help thinking the guy looks like some bizarre waiter in a decadent Nazi restaurant, a curiosity hired for the diversion he might provide the easily bored customers.

What must it have been like growing up a dwarf? Flynn wonders. Was it a matter of surviving an endless barrage of repeated, unfunny jokes and taunts? Or was it more a matter of isolation, of being set apart, unincorporated right from the womb, right from day one on the planet, no one pulling you into the breast of the normal, the full-grown?

He leaves the question in the parking lot, turns, and heads for Wireless.

Flynn enters through the diner entrance, stops in the doorway next to Tjun the bouncer, says, “What kind of a night?”

Tjun shrugs. He’s an Aborigine, tall, bearded, achingly slender, of indeterminate age, and, supposedly, deadly with a long-blade knife that has a name no one can pronounce. He showed up at Wireless five years ago, responding to a help-wanted ad in the Spy. He’s been the head bouncer ever since. No one seems to know where he lives. He keeps himself above the social politics of the bar and doesn’t even seem too interested in radio in general. When Flynn asked Ferrie about him once, the co-owner went melodramatic and said, “Guy saved my life once and I don’t want to say anything else about him.” Flynn treats Tjun with a rare respect, never uses his sarcastic brand of humor in the man’s presence.

“Hazel and her friends inside?” Flynn asks.

“At the bar,” Tjun says in an odd, clipped accent that Flynn loves.

Flynn moves past him, steps into the smoky-blue glow of the room, blinks a few times. Each time he steps inside Wireless, he has to give Ferrie and Most credit for achieving the atmosphere that almost all clubs reach for and the majority look foolish missing. Flynn thinks of it as expensive decadence, a place that can feel foreign even if you’ve spent a year’s worth of nights there, a place where all kinds of verbally coded purchase and sales agreements might take place and payouts feel like they could require three different types of currency. It’s even more amazing that the club has this feel when the fact is that most of the regulars are stunningly middle-class and usually short on funds. And yet, there’s no denying the room has a tone to it, an envelope of pure mood, a sensory tide produced by no more than two dreamy men with a vision of weird, unstriving hipness and the resurgence of an almost-bygone medium.

Flynn spots Hazel and slides up to the bar between the college boys, clamping an arm across each of their backs, saying, “Guys, I think there’s a free pool table around in the back.”

The two look at each other as if one should argue, then walk away in a slow double sulk. Flynn moves in close until his arm is touching Hazel and she says, “You really get off on screwing up my fantasies.”

“They’re babes in the woods, dear. I’m saving you from the law.”

Most puts a cognac down in front of Flynn and walks to the other end of the bar without a word.

“Then I guess I owe you.”

“Do you work at being a smart-ass? Do you practice when you’re alone?”

“I just want to be straight. This would be banter, right? We’re bantering?”

“Not even close. I’m just working on not liking you.”

“You have to like me, Flynn. I’m one of the fold. That’s the rules.”

“The rules are,” Flynn says, “that there are no rules, my love—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Speaking of which, I understand there might be some trouble.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I got a message on my machine from Wallace in that voice. You know that voice, darling?”

“You’ve been warned.”

“You know I hate playing the mediator schmuck. I hate that crap.”

“Who asked you? I never asked for a mediator.”

“Why do you always want to stir up trouble?”

There’s a beat and then they both burst out laughing. Flynn shakes his head, puts a flat palm up to his forehead, and says, “Look what you’ve got me saying.”

“That,” Hazel says, “is an instant classic, G.T. Stir up trouble. That won’t be forgotten, I promise.”

“Look, dearest, heart of my heart, I get the feeling Wallace is going to do a little saber-rattling.”

Hazel gives the smile that she knows gets to Flynn. “Well,” she says, “you know Wallace. Tiny saber.”

“Come on. We don’t need these kinds of problems right now.”

“Look, Flynn, Wallace is losing it. He’s getting more paranoid every day. I don’t know how Olga lives with the little bastard. He’s lost the point of the whole thing. Little brain’s gotten corrupted. What’s that quote about ultimate power?”

“Don’t know it. Listen, Wallace is just a little uptight about bringing the heat down. He hates press and the Spy’s been running these articles on the brothers and all. I think he’s just afraid you might escalate things, you know, over the line—”

“Whose line?”

“—and ruin it for everyone. You know, for Wallace this is still a lark, a prank kind of thing. He’s not into the whole philosophical thing. He just likes the reaction, the way it makes him feel. He doesn’t come at it from a — I don’t know — a political angle. He’s not going to change—”

“And neither am I.”

“And neither are you. And I think if we just have a little powwow—”

“Powwow?”

“—upstairs, and try to talk this out, find some agreement—”

“I hate sitting on those orange crates,” Hazel says. “I get splinters in my ass.”

“—make everyone secure to some extent. Reach a compromise — sorry, sorry, I know how you hate that word, my mistake, not a compromise, but an agreement, an understanding.”

“So where is the little toad?”

“That annual dinner-dance thing. Down the Baron.”

“He’s coming by after?”

“He loves to gloat. He’ll probably bring the freaking trophy in with him. Sit it up on the bar.”

“He does that,” Hazel says, “I swear to God he’ll carry it out of here without using his hands.”

Flynn looks at Hazel, smiles, and shrugs. “Look, I’m just saying give me a chance here, okay? Think unity.”

Hazel makes a face like she’s bitten into something rancid, but even with a sour expression there’s something about her Flynn finds endearing. Despite all the sneering-punk accessories and the rumors of obscene tattoos and the slightly spiked blond hair that she insists on running a strawberry streak through, Flynn finds something vulnerable in Hazel. He’s sure no one else can see it, that they’d probably laugh him into the parking lot if he mentioned it. But he can’t get around it. For all her tough-as-nails rebel act and tomboy-from-hell attitude, he wants to somehow protect her. Maybe from herself. Sometimes he wonders what she’d look like without all the shock makeup. Beneath the eyeliner and occasional nose ring, she’s got a sweet, kind of open face — blue-green eyes and smallish features. Her diet of speed and veggie pocket-sandwiches has turned her body into a cadaver-thin reed, but Flynn thinks she has a sensual walk, a kind of languid, careless sway that, were she aware of it, she’d eliminate immediately.

Somebody yells, “G.T.,” from somewhere deeper in the bar and Flynn says, “I’ve got to make the rounds. Just think about what I’ve said, okay?”

Hazel reaches over and pinches his cheek, then disappears into the crowd. Flynn heads for Minnesota. He enters the billiards room to a hail of calls and whistles, then endures several minutes of back-slapping and arm punching. Someone slides a drink into his hand and finally the room settles back down and turns its collective attention to the antique Philco radio. Flynn listens for just a second, then asks, “Who’d they go after tonight?”

In unison, several voices yell, “WQSG,” as if it were a cheer of some kind.

“QSG,” Flynn says, then glances at his watch. “Jesus, the boys are cutting it close tonight.”

From the speaker of the Philco issues the hottest broadcast in Quinsigamond this season — the O’Zebedee Brothers’ Outlaw Network, radio pirates extraordinaire, myth creatures of the airwaves, an urban legend without rival in this town.

And as if the brothers could somehow sense the growing tension in Minnesota, they start to confront the crowd’s main concern:

… and a glance to the digital in the dash tells us that about now all the radio rats huddled down under the big neon G are starting to sweat just a little as it begins to look like their allegiances could be tested. But listen up and lighten up, subcitizens, ’cause James and John are fellow devotees of the one and only erotic empress herself. And we promise we will never come between you and Veronica. So rest at ease, the goddess will embrace your ears on schedule …

3

It’s not until after she’s parked in the deserted mall garage that Ronnie realizes she never turned on the radio, that she drove from her apartment to the radio station in silence. She likes to put herself on, joke with herself, so she sits in the Jeep and starts acting out a five-second tragedy, her head down on top of her hands as they grip the steering wheel. Where’s my loyalty, she pretends to think, where’s my devotion? She brings her head up, laughing, her own best audience. She grabs her old Girl Scout knapsack and says out loud, “Ronnie, why are you wasting your time in this city?”

She climbs out of the jeep, slams the door so that it echoes the length of the cement garage, walks down the exit ramp toward the small quadrangle of Astroturf between the garage and the mall. She loves stopping in the quadrangle at this time of night, the place eerie and filled with this smoky mist she never sees anywhere else. She likes to stop midway across the fake grass, look back at the wall of the garage, seven stories of cement levels with windowlike symmetrical squares cut in everywhere. She likes to stand there, enclosed, caught inside this pocket of air between the parking garage and the glass rear wall of the mall. It makes her feel like she’s the only character in some forgotten French or Italian art film from decades back. She wishes she spoke a foreign language so she could ad-lib a scene. Something about an invading army just miles away. She’s the broken-down servant girl, abused beyond description, the sole carrier of information that could hold off the enemy. Her warrior lover is waiting here on these foggy moors. He’s bleeding from behind the ear, deep red oozing into the ragged cotton cloth he’s wrapped around his neck like a bandanna. She runs the last few yards toward him, throws herself into his arms. They both fall to the wet ground. Mud covers their legs. It begins to rain. The wind picks up, gets even worse. He looks down at her, his vision obscuring. He says only, “My brave one.” She stares back up at him, one foot over the borderline of delirium. Her red lips quiver, part. She says, “We, we …” He waits, desperate for her news. She draws in a breath, tries again. “We …’ll be right back after a word from our sponsor.”

She moves up to the glass elevator affixed to the mall wall and says, “Girl, what is wrong with your brain?”

The elevator door opens and she enters and turns around to look out on the quad as she rises. She reaches under the olive-green flap of the knapsack, digs down into the canvas folds, pulls out with one hand an antique silver hip flask. She screws off the flask top and swallows a warm mouthful of mescal. She secures the flask, resacks it, and turns toward the inner wall just as the elevator arrives at the third floor. Once again, a master of timing.

She steps out onto the slippery Spanish-tile floor, lets her eyes adjust to the dimmed after-hours lighting of the mall. This is the only time she can stomach the mall, and thankfully ten-to-two has always been her shift since she came to the station. Sometimes, after she turns the mike over to Sonny, who does the two-to-six occult show, she goes window shopping. Security doesn’t seem to mind. She passes them on their rounds, makes risque comments that they love, scratches the German shepherd behind the ears.

Ronnie knows every store in the mall, but she’s never purchased a thing here. She buys everything mail-order, through catalogues. She wishes she could get her groceries this way. She doesn’t know what it is about the mall in daylight, when the stores are open for business, that repels her. She’s never stopped to analyze it, find a meaning that could alter things. She just takes it as a given that she can only accept the mall when it’s closed, a retail ghost town. Last month, peering into the display window of Lear Jeweler’s, she thought of herself as the vampire browser — she walks by night, skulks through the shadows of the Orange Julius kiosk, swoops past the crypt of the shoeshine bench.

Down the enclosed alley from the elevator, Wayne, the engineer, is playing catch, bouncing a red rubber ball off the cement wall that leads up to the studio. This is not a good sign. Beyond him, inside the huge plate-glass window that lets shoppers look in on the daytime announcers hard at work, like they were as interesting as pizza flippers, she can see Vinnie, the station manager, and Ray, the Nazi who mans the six-to-ten shift. They’re having another mini-fit, flailing arms and screaming at each other. The broadcast booth is soundproof and this turns their raging into a silent comedy, an Abbott and Costello bit set in the not-so-golden age of radio.

“Would this be a good night to call in sick?” she says, starting to approach Wayne.

He goes into his baseball routine. He makes exaggerated moves with his body, somehow jumps and leaps in slow motion, turns on his cigar-scarred, hysterical, play-by-play voice. “What a shot … the Wayne-man can kiss this one … No, no sir, no siree, it’s off the left-field wall … the runner is barreling around second … Mr. W fields it and fires for home … the runner is sliding … Wilcox takes position …”

He fires the rubber ball at her. She doesn’t stop, doesn’t break her stride. She punches her right arm upward, all confidence, and rips the ball out of its trajectory.

Wayne’s voice surges upward in pitch and volume. “She’s got him, she’s nailed him, she’s put the game away. The crowd goes insane …” He cuts into the garbled hiss of a capacity mob pumped up on immediate victory and does a solo version of the Wave.

“You missed your calling,” she says, moving up next to him, keeping an eye on the histrionics in the broadcast booth.

“The Voice of Baseball?”

“Terrorist. You’ve got that kind of ego.”

“And to think I was going to spring for the number four at Tiananmen Takeout.”

“Uh-uh. No more midnight buffets, Wayne. I’m turning into Ms. MSG.”

“Microphone’s Saving Grace.”

“Stop being funny. What’s the story with Schultzie and Klink?”

“Uh-oh, I guess someone didn’t have the station tuned in on the drive to work.”

“I can’t listen to Ray anymore. Throws my whole mood. Ruins my show.”

“You used to be amused and now you’re just disgusted.”

“Yeah, something like that. We’ve been hit again?”

““They’re still at it. We’re still off the air.”

“For Christ sake, Wayne, I’m on in twenty minutes.”

“That’s what I told them. Nothing to worry about.”

“There’s nothing you can do?”

“These guys get better every day. I’m a hack compared to some of them.”

“You tried everything?”

“All I know is it’s coming from the east side.”

“Vinnie’s not going to make it.”

“You should have been here when Federman called.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“I told Vinnie. I said, ‘Vinnie, we’ll be clear by ten. Ronnie’s on at ten and she’s their goddess.’”

“You charmer. Here we go, I’m blushing.”

“What? Es verdad, darling. They’ve hit every shift at the station, at least twice, except for ten-to-two. The Ronnie shift. Sweetheart of the subset.”

“Seriously, every shift?”

“They’ve hit Ray six times this month. Jesus, do they hate Ray.”

“So they’ve got taste on top of brains.”

“Speaking of taste, old pal …”

“Honest to God, Wayne, I can’t do Chinese tonight. Maybe nachos, later on. Did you fix the microwave?”

“I’m not talking Velveeta here, you know. I’m feeling pretty worn down tonight. Doing a lot of overtime. This could be a long night for your favorite tech-man.”

“Mr. Coffee broken?”

“Studio coffee? On my stomach?”

“Jesus, you’re a leech. Why don’t you ever bring the booze?”

“C’mon. You’re the big breadwinner around here. What do you say?”

“I say let’s see if we get our signal back up—”

“Guaranteed, fifteen minutes.”

“Yeah, well, you talk to me then.”

“So you’re saying it’s conditional? Your generosity to a friend is conditional? This is an either/or thing?”

Ronnie gives him a tight smile, throws the rubber ball into the air over his head, and starts to walk toward the studio door. Ray is breaking things, snapping pencils in two as she enters the broadcast booth. Vinnie has fallen into a silent depression. This always happens after a call from Mr. Federman.

“So, Raymie,” she says, dumping her knapsack onto the board, “the whole city shut you off tonight. What the hell did you say?”

Ray takes a breath and sits back in his chair, puts on his low, in-control voice. “That’s right, Wilcox, push some buttons. Brilliant move. Annoy me some more.”

She squints down at him, moves over to the-lump-called-Vinnie, and starts to massage his shoulders. “Relax, Raymond. Pull yourself together. Your status as a professional is on the line here.”

“Make some jokes, girl—”

“That’s bitch-goddess to you, Ray.”

“—be funny, be a wise-ass.”

“That’s what they pay me for, remember?”

“Shock-jock shrink with the whore’s mouth.”

“It’s a weird world, Ray. You have to know your market. There’re a lot more lovesick depressives out there than paranoid Nazis. That’s what I try to tell Federman over lunch. ‘That’s the reason for Raymond’s numbers, Mr. F.’ So far he buys it.”

Ray loses his grip, goes for the bait like a dim trout. “You want to throw the numbers at me, you little bitch, you want to start in?”

“People,” Vinnie manages to say.

“Love to start in, Ray. I’m amazed these east-siders could jam your show. No one else seems to know it exists.”

“My freaking numbers would be fine if I had a little consistency, if I weren’t off the freaking air twice a week because some little delinquents are allowed—”

“Here we go, here it is. We’ve got to keep the little bastards out of the Radio Shacks, right? That’s the answer, right?”

“Listen, the next time you’re out with Federman, if you’ve ever been out with Federman—”

“Twice a week, Ray, just like these interruptions.”

He’s boiling over. He knocks a metal clipboard to the floor. “You tell Federman, the son of a bitch, that maybe the problem with the ratings book is because he’s screwed with the station’s whole identity. We’re freaking schizophrenic. We’re confusing the goddamn audience. He lines up my political reportage—”

“Political reportage,” she repeats in a deep and put-on voice. “C’mon, Raymie, you’re a reactionary hack with a good voice. You’re Morton Downey with a head injury.”

“Followed by your bedroom filth, followed by the satanist crap from that fairy with the earring—”

“His name’s Sonny, Ray. He told me he loves your show.”

“Followed by that moronic excuse for humor during commute time. Collect call to the Vatican. There’s something original.”

“Well, we can’t all book acclaimed Holocaust revisionists, Ray.”

“Did you even listen to that show?”

“Sorry, Ray. I was eating sushi in Little Asia. With Federman.”

“Bullshit you were with Federman.”

“Whatever you say, Ray. Vinnie, pal, you okay?”

“I don’t know why they’re singling us out,” Vinnie says. He’s dressed in a navy polyester suit that’s too big in some places and too small in others.

“They don’t single us out,” Ronnie says. “They’re hitting other stations.”

“They’re hitting us the most,” Vinnie whines.

Ray gets up and walks out of the booth. Ronnie slides into his chair and says, “We’re all-talk. We’re a better target. For Christ sake, Vinnie, some of the metal music stations wouldn’t even know they were being jammed.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go after Ray like that.”

“Aw, Mom, he hit me first.”

“Do you really have lunch with Federman?”

“Vinnie, you wouldn’t believe it. Man’s got an appetite that won’t quit.”

“You’re not making my night any easier, Ronnie.”

“Sorry, Vin. Get on the floor and I’ll change everything.”

“I hate it when you do that.”

“Give me a break, Vinnie. They write me a check every week ’cause I do that.”

“Federman called. He was all over me.”

“This isn’t your fault.”

“He called me incompetent.”

“He likes to yell. He thinks that’s the thing to do. He’s basically a very insecure man.”

“He said he was calling the FCC and Mayor Welby.”

“Welby won’t take his call.”

“I just can’t believe they can’t track these kids.”

“Who says they’re kids?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why I called them kids.”

The red rubber ball comes flying through the air over their heads, smashes against the plate-glass window without breaking it, and bounces once, down onto the board and then out into the hallway. It’s accompanied by Ray letting out a throat-rupturing scream. “You leave your goddamn toys at home.”

Ronnie shakes her head and pulls her chair up to the board. She turns up the in-booth volume and Vinnie makes a wincing sound. The speakers give out a second of high-pitch squeal, stabilize, and then reveal a man’s voice, this deep, smooth, 4 A.M. voice:

Ouch, sorry about that. Brother John is asleep at the dials. And it looks like it’s almost time for the beauty of the band-spread, the Cassandra of coitus, the sweet sister of all serial subcasters, our Ms. Ronnie. Kick this engine over, driver, the O’Zebedee Brothers best be mobile before those anal Fed-men follow our frequency. To Raymond, the fascist in short pants, don’t bother to thank us for these little vacations. Till next time, friends, remember, our mission is transmission. Jam high and jam wide.

The booth fills up with white noise and Ray rushes in and goes for the headphones. Ronnie grabs them first and slides them around her neck saying, “Sorry, Ray, it’s ten o’clock. I’m on the air.”

… What you’re telling me is that you need some certainty that she’s fulfilled.

I just wish there was some signal, some way to know for sure. Women don’t have to worry—

We’re about to argue, darling.

No, I don’t mean—

I’m fairly certain I know just what you mean.

Don’t be like that, Ronnie, don’t—

Listen. Take a second here and listen. I’m about to do you a favor. I’m about to share something with you. Certainty is the enemy of sensual ecstasy. Say that to yourself. I’ll repeat it for you. Certainty is the enemy of sensual ecstasy. Our pleasure always derives from our plunge into the unknown, the risk, the daring. The excitement comes from not knowing how far things can go, what levels of experience might be reached, the possibility, each and every time, that some ceiling might be broken through, that we might just get beyond known sensation, surpass anything our imagination has come up with.

You’re saying doubt is good?

Not doubt. Listen to me. Uncertainty. Risk. Unknown territory. Unrevealed wisdom. Are you listening to me?

Yeah, yes. Yes.

But you can’t see me. There’s a good chance you don’t even know what I look like. That’s the beauty of this medium. One of the few that can still retain mystery. Mystery. That’s an enticing word. I love that word. I don’t know who you are or where you are or what you look like. You don’t know anything about me beyond the sound of my voice. Are you lying in a bed right now?

I’m in the kitchen.

You shouldn’t have told me. Turn off the lights. Get down on the floor.

Down on the floor?

Just stop talking. Just listen to me. Give up on this need to be certain of everything, looking for hidden signals everywhere.

Okay, I’m on the—

Knock it off. I mean it. Stop telling me. Do you know what I look like? Have you ever seen a picture?

I don’t—

Answer me.

No. I don’t know what you look like.

All right, then. Now, you just try to keep quiet for a second. It’s been a different night for me. My engineer went home sick. Normally he’s my partner here. He’s a tremendous help to me. But tonight I’m left all alone here in the studio. But that’s all right. I can easily adjust. The animal that survives is the one that can adapt. You have to always remember that. So it’s a different night, an unknown. So maybe that accounts for what I’ve done.

What you’ve done …

Quiet. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen our studios or been down here, but our broadcast booth is located behind a great big picture window that looks out on the East Corridor of the mall. I guess the idea is that shoppers can come by and watch the announcers broadcast, see how radio works. Personally, I think this is a mistake. I think you’re taking something away from the people rather than giving something. You’re removing the image in their heads, the faces and bodies they’ve hung on these floating voices. I think it’s a mistake. But I’ve adapted. My particular show is on after the mall closes up. So the only audience I have is an occasional security guard and his dog as they walk their patrol. The guard might stop for a second. He might stare at me a little absentmindedly, scratching the dog’s ear as it hangs close to his leg. Then he’ll nod and move on. This is fine with me. I’m really more or less ambivalent about his presence. I’m normally too tuned into the caller. I’m in the loop of the call, you know. I’m in the process, building something, letting one word lead to the next. Pulling the anonymous voice out of itself and splattering it out over fifty thousand watts to all the unseen ears listening in six states. That’s what my engineer and I do here. We create little happenings. We construct new environments, on the spot, instantaneously, no blueprints, no plans, no permits. But my engineer is out sick tonight. So I’m alone here in the studio. And it’s a peaceful place. Everyone should have this serene kind of place. The lights are dim, easy on the eyes. The booth is soundproof so there’re no harsh noises or distractions. And it’s warm. Actually, too warm. I began to find it uncomfortable after a while. Do you know what I did, caller? Don’t answer. Keep still. First I removed my blazer. I hung it on the back of my chair. And I felt a little better: I kicked off my shoes, let my feet out of the vise, okay? And then I just kept going with it. It felt wonderful and I kept going. I unbuttoned my blouse, and folded it and put it on the floor next to my chair. And I pulled my camisole over my head and let it fall on top of my blouse. And then I just pulled down the zipper of my skirt, lifted out of the seat a little, and slid it off down my legs. And I ended up naked, alone here in the broadcast booth, taking calls, and nobody knowing, until now, what was happening. And then, you’ll love this part, caller — don’t say a word — I was putting on a public service announcement, about fifteen minutes back, remember, the Emergency Systems Test? And I looked up from the board, and there was Mr. Security Guard and his shepherd, right outside the booth, staring in the window at me, mouth just hanging open slightly. I burst out laughing and I waved, and after a second, he just went on his way, went on to the rest of his checkpoints and all—

Are you still naked?

Yes, I am. When I finish with you I’ll get dressed again. The point is, I had no idea this would occur when I came to work tonight. And certainly the guard didn’t know. The dog didn’t know. It was just this momentary occurrence. Won’t happen again in a lifetime, probably. But it did happen tonight. You just never know. It jumps out at you. You have to go with it. Shake up the routine. Shake down the system. That’s where the juice comes from, caller. That’s where life heats up. It’s that little mystery-charge that makes breathing worthwhile. You’ve got to stop looking for these signals to confirm everything for you. You’re looking for sureties that just aren’t there. You bought into this religion that says logic exists, that one and one will always equal two. And I’m sorry, but I can’t say that’s the case. That guard tonight had his math shaken, okay? And if you ask me, it was for the better.

So you’re naked right now?

Okay, there’s no helping some people. I’m pulling your plug, caller. Give your girlfriend a flare gun for Christmas. Maybe that’ll help you out. This is Libido Liveline and we’ll be back after these messages.

4

Detective Shaw is on her knees. She’s leaning against the wooden railing of the choir loft, all her weight on her elbows. She’s looking out into the enclosed cavern of St. Brendan’s, trying to remember how long ago it was when a structure like this one could invoke feelings of both security and doom, majesty and abomination, and a vague, hazy kind of awe.

She thinks that maybe a lot of these feelings were products of perspective, the overwhelming smallness of the child set so harshly against the enormity of the cathedral, the bishop’s own church, with its ceilings that rose up so high that looking at them, striving to make out the biblical icons depicted in their curves, brought on vertigo and even quick belts of frightening nausea.

Now St. Brendan’s just looks overly ornate, an example of misplaced economic priorities and fashions that will never come back. Maybe, more than anything, the church is a lesson in the cost of stasis, the bland, cold fact of obsolescence.

The choir loft door makes a whining sound and Hannah turns to see an elderly Oriental man shuffling toward the immense organ.

She stands and shakes her head.

“Dr. Cheng,” she says, “you didn’t have to climb all the way up here.”

“Detective Shaw,” he says, his voice a raspy whisper, his eyes closing and his head bowing slightly.

The old man takes her hand in his, comes forward, and plants a subtle, fatherly kiss on her cheek. They settle down onto the organ bench and Dr. Cheng slowly begins to unbutton a black Burberry overcoat and loosen a paisley silk scarf from around his neck. Hannah sees that, as always, under-neath, he wears a simple black cassock, a coolie-type cotton gown that’s completely out of step with his wealth and status. She knows that parked down in the street, somewhere behind the cruisers and the M.E.’s car, is the doctor’s chauffeured Rolls-Royce. And she knows that if anyone can steer her down the right road after Fr. Todorov’s killer, it’s the unofficial emperor of Little Asia.

From below comes the flash of the cameras documenting the charred confessional booth and the hushed murmur of the chancery’s director of communications conferring with a reporter from the Spy’s city desk.

Hannah reaches over and touches Dr. Cheng’s arm. “I want to thank you for taking my call. It wasn’t necessary for you to drive down here. I could’ve come to you.”

“It’s better this way,” Dr. Cheng says.

Hannah nods and fingers some white keys on the organ.

“Meaning you don’t want me down Little Asia anymore?”

Dr. Cheng lets out a rough, wheezy breath.

“The landscape is changing, Hannah. You know this. Ever since our mutual friend left. Things are deteriorating more and more. I can feel the ground crumbling under my feet.”

Hannah looks up at him, tries to smile, and manages a shrug.

Their mutual friend is Lenore Thomas, already a dark myth in Bangkok Park. Lenore was the original strong-arm goddess, a woman with the will of Stalin and a tongue like a razor. When Hannah applied to work narcotics, Lenore was the one who backed her, then showed her the trade. And though more often than not Hannah fell victim to Lenore’s bullying wit, she also fell under Lenore’s spell, came to view her as something beyond a role model, something more like a wildly complex Zen master, a roshi of not simply narc detail, but the landscapes of power and force and persuasion and dominance.

It was no secret to Hannah that Lenore had a bone-deep amphetamine habit, but it did seem inconceivable that any chemical could outmaneuver the woman. Lenore was just too savvy, too smart and instinctive and obsessively disciplined. But about a year back, Lenore got involved in an unsanctioned bust down in St. James Cemetery. To this day internal affairs has blanketed the details, but the entire department knows something went utterly wrong that night. A fellow officer and a department liaison were killed and the king of Bangkok Park, a Latino named Cortez, disappeared with an undetermined cache of what the rumormongers simply call product.

And after a week talking into a tape recorder in Mayor Welby’s office, Lenore also disappeared. The official word was a leave of absence and an extended stay at a detox clinic in Vermont. But Shaw will never buy this. It just doesn’t wash with what she knows about Lenore Thomas.

In Lenore’s wake, Hannah was immediately transferred to homicide. And for the past year she’s lived with an emptiness that only seems to increase. It’s as if her teacher vanished before she could impart the final and most important set of instructions. To fight this feeling, Hannah has tried to make herself into Lenore’s ghost. It’s not an easy transformation. Their personalities and techniques were never similar. But as Lenore always said, You can probably will the dead to life if you want it badly enough. So for the past six months Hannah’s been haunting the streets of Bangkok Park, kicking informant ass, schmoozing with the hookers and pimps, growing more comfortable with the nuances of casual brutality.

Dr. Cheng finally removes his leather gloves and says, “How is her brother’s asthma?”

Hannah’s developed a habit of checking in on Lenore’s brother, Ike. “Much better,” she says. “I think that mandrake root compress you put together really did the trick.”

There’s a few seconds of silence.

Dr. Cheng looks down at her hand resting on the organ keys and says, “Don’t read more into my words than is intended, Hannah.”

Then he gets up and slowly walks to the balcony railing and looks down at the small pockets of homicide cops and lab men sealing plastic bags and drinking takeout coffee. He crosses his arms over his chest and says, “Our relationship is still secure. My presence here makes that certain. I’ve come to think of you as one of my own, Hannah.”

“A bastard daughter,” she says, and gives him a smile.

He squints as if embarrassed by her language and says, “Perhaps a long-lost niece.”

Dr. Cheng is the last testament to the first wave of Asian immigrants to make Bangkok Park their home. Hannah has no idea if he’s a licensed medical doctor, but she’s aware that he’s spent sixty-plus years ministering to the health of his people with herb remedies and acupuncture. She has no idea how old he is, but she knows he arrived in Quinsigamond sometime after the Volstead Act, in his early twenties and with more money in his pocket than his fellow travelers. She’s never known the specifics of his Tong connections, but she knows that by the end of World War II, he had some kind of interest in all the bigger businesses in the Little Asia end of Bangkok Park.

Hannah sees Dr. Cheng as a classic example of the neighborhood mayor, a man never officially elected to a position of authority, but who controls the flow of money down his block, who can secure jobs and housing, who can keep the peace and take care of the helpless.

On his tax forms, Dr. Cheng is listed as a merchant, and it’s true that for the past half-century he’s owned and overseen the operation of Dr. Cheng’s Herbarium, a tiny hole in the wall on the corner of Verlin Ave, that continues to offer exotic balms and oils and medicinal teas to the consumers of Little Asia. He’s always lived in the small apartment above the business, alone except for a long line of valets that are all rumored to come from the same family.

Dr. Cheng has no immediate family of his own. He never married and has no children that anyone knows of. But he’s filled his upper management positions with various distant cousins and loosely adopted kin. Today the doctor is diversified into everything from frozen yogurt franchises to a controlling interest in WOXS, New England’s only all-Asian radio station. But Hannah knows that it’s an empire forged long ago in the bowels of a dozen or more early Bangkok Park tenements. And that the doctor’s only overhead costs were thin mattresses, bamboo pipes, and the importation costs on the best opium run out of Shanghai.

Hannah gets a kick out of their relationship, a bond between a white female narcotics cop and the granddaddy of the biggest ring of classic opium dens in the Northeast. She finds a similarity to their brain patterns. She finds they share parallel notions of will and power. She thinks that possibly they both war against radical egos that could obscure their judgment and rationality.

Dr. Cheng has lived a life pretty much unconnected to the surface brand of hypocritical ethics and morality they peddle in the City Council chambers. He’s so much wiser than the hack pols who’ve seemingly charted the course of this city. He’s allowed them to think they’ve controlled his destiny. Three generations of Quinsigamond ruling class have pocketed the doctor’s kickbacks and gone to sleep assured of their stability and superiority, all the while oblivious to another hidden but enormous picture, a wildly complex system of covert economics that slowly carved a secret face on the surface of the city, and more important, that excavated raw earth until there came to exist an underground more intricate and enigmatic than anything on the outer skin of the municipality.

Every ethnic group in Quinsigamond has its own neighborhood mayor. Some are cut-and-dried wise guys from a long line of mob families. Others appear to run a cleaner show than the City Council and control their streets like a closely held corporation. But every one of them understands the basic, primal facts that supply and demand is God’s own rule and there’s more darkness in the human heart than light.

The Italians have the legendary Gennaro Pecci. The blacks have the Reverend Hartley James, longtime king of the north-side projects. The Jews have always had the Singer brothers, first Shel and now Meyer. The Irish still have “the Mortician,” Willy “Bud” Loftus. The Latinos, until recently, had the mysterious Mr. Cortez. The new arrivals — the Haitians, the Jamaicans, the small pocket of Turks over on Smyrna — all have candidates jockeying for position, sorting each other out with cut throats and car bombs. But no one has ruled longer, with more foresight or discretion or financial brilliance, than the ancient Dr. Cheng.

Hannah gets up and follows the old man to the railing. There’s still a heavy smell in the air — charred wood and flesh. She puts a hand on the doctor’s shoulder and says, “Things have been a little crazy for a couple of years. It’ll get back to normal soon.”

Dr. Cheng seems to be having trouble breathing tonight. It bothers Hannah that he’s starting to look his age. Just a year ago, when she first set out to know him, when she started buying ginseng twice a week down at the Herbarium, he still seemed like he was in his prime.

Without looking at her, he says quietly, “In the past, Hannah, I always found a way to enforce a balance, to make the neighborhood work for all. You can’t imagine what had to be overcome. There was a mentality to reshape.”

He turns and leans his backside against the railing, which makes Hannah nervous.

“I had to will a radical notion into every individual head. That we were now a new breed, that we were collective Asians rather than separate, nationalist tribes. History had to be obliterated in the name of survival, and then in the name of progress. I hated doing this, but there was no other way. And I was never completely successful — I never thought I would be — but I managed, always, to give the appearance of unity. The image. And often, this was enough.”

“I’ve always thought what you managed was stunning,” Hannah says.

Dr. Cheng reaches out, squeezes her hand again. “You have no shame, flattering an old man with lies.” He pauses and looks down to his feet. “Six months ago, Chak, the Cambodian, eliminates Mo, the Laotian. War among the tribes. We’re spilling our own blood now. The Singer brothers once told me an old Yiddish saying. It translates roughly, but the point survives: One stupid person can throw a stone so deep into the river that ten wise men will never find it.”

Hannah lets a moment pass and then says, “Anything you can tell me about the priest, Doc?”

He acts as if he hasn’t heard her.

“What I’ve accomplished,” he says, “is unraveling week by week. No one knows better than you what’s happening to Bangkok. My control is eroding. Agreements are not being honored. Treaties are not being acknowledged. Tribes are battling over nickel-and-dime nonsense. Territories challenged for the sake of an additional street, another half-block of fire-bombed tenements …”

“Doctor,” Hannah tries.

“Gennaro Pecci wouldn’t take my call last week, Hannah. What am I to think? There are rumors about the Loftus family.”

Hannah stays quiet, stares down at the floor.

“And among my own … They’re all thinking of themselves as villagers again. The Cambodians have let it be known they have no confidence in the doctor. The gangs are loose cannons ready to plow the old way into the ground.”

He struggles up from the railing and half turns, extends his thin arms outward as if to present himself to Hannah.

“What can this old man do for you?”

Hannah stands, and before she can control herself, she steps into him, gives him a full, long hug, feels, even through the Burberry, how frail he’s gotten.

Then she releases him and before either can signify embarrassment, she head-motions to the floor beneath the choir loft and says, “Did the gangs do that, Doctor? Did the Hyenas set fire to the priest?”

He raises his thin eyebrows and says, “Do you think so?”

Hannah bites on her lip. “Todorov has been grabbing a lot of press by nosing into the gangs. He’s spent time in Bangkok lately. You just said how loose these kids are. Todorov says the wrong word to a couple of seventeen-year-old Hyenas juiced on PCP and meth. He ends up in the middle of a bilingual argument. Next thing you know, the poor bastard is toast.”

Dr. Cheng takes air in through his nose and says, “Keep going.”

Hannah stares at him, then nods. “Okay. We’ve got a precedent for the benzine. We know that three months back, the Hyenas blew a bodega in a raid on the Popes. Our lab guys were drooling telling us it was benzine.”

“Yes.”

“But no matter how juiced they are, the Hyenas have to answer to your boy Uncle Chak—”

Dr. Cheng shakes his head. “He’s not my boy, Hannah. Chak doesn’t even come to the monthly summits anymore. He’s preaching a sermon of Cambodian purity.”

She nods. She feels bad for the old man. The topography of his world is changing as quickly as he says and no amount of reassurance from her can hide the truth.

“Still,” Hannah says, “I don’t see the percentage. If Chak wants to be a long-term player, and we know he does, he’s not going to sanction random violence. Especially not outside of the Park. Whacking the crusading priest doesn’t ensure your stability. This kind of thing is going to be on the front page of the Spy for weeks. You know Welby and Bendix and the Council are going to have to make some noise and slap someone hard.”

Dr. Cheng walks back to the organ and toes a foot pedal distractedly.

He says, “Chak would sooner have the Hyenas attack me than this Father Todorov.”

“Then the Hyenas simply lost their heads or acted on their own for reasons we can only guess—”

“In which case we’ll know by tomorrow. Chak will need to send a signal that he can police his own territory. He’ll round up a few of their low-level soldiers, whether they were involved with the priest or not. He’ll leave them hanging by their feet from the streetlamps on Voegelin Avenue.”

“Then again,” Hannah says, “if the Hyenas didn’t torch Todorov—”

“Then perhaps someone wants us to believe that they did.”

“That’s your theory?” Hannah says, only partially a question.

Dr. Cheng doesn’t respond.

Hannah turns back toward the railing and looks out at a life-sized Christ figure suspended by metal chains from the ceiling, hanging on a silver metal cross over the marble altar below. Even from this distance she can make out the silver beads that represent droplets of blood from the hands and feet, from the wound in the side, from the crown of thorns biting into the rim of the head. It’s a particularly gruesome crucifix, a haunting monument to an endless and unjustified agony.

She wonders for a second if Fr. Todorov had a chance to glimpse the dying metal Christ in the air above him before the priest’s heart exploded from shock and incalculable pain.

She turns away. There’s no test the lab techs can run to answer her question. No way to analyze the seared eyeball, to dip it in some beaker of chemicals and reveal a trace image of a crucified redeemer.

Hannah waits a few seconds, then moves over to Dr. Cheng, pulls his coat closed over his chest, and takes him by the arm. She starts to steer him to the exit, walking slowly, listening, uncomfortably, to the old man’s wheeze.

At the top of the spiral stairway, Dr. Cheng turns to her and says, “Did I tell you Gennaro Pecci wouldn’t take my call?”

5

DeForest Road looks like someone’s chronic dream of suburbia. In fact, it’s located completely within the city, ten minutes from the heart of downtown. It’s just that this cookie-cutter design seems so familiar — row on row of identically sized lots, graced with tract houses, three-bedroom ranches in pastel colors, lined up, a lesson in uniformity.

Crouched low in the shrubbery, Speer chews on nicotine gum and thinks the whole street could be the exterior set of an endless situation comedy. Clean-cut kids hysterically agonizing over the new dent in Dad’s bumper. The zany neighbor with the get-rich-quick scheme. The door-to-door salesman hawking an explosive vacuum cleaner. A millennium of story lines about familial high jinks in the land of God.

If anyone spots him, Speer will take the offensive, flash the badge, bark from behind clenched teeth, roll the eyes of the weary protector. DEA, dickhead, get lost, there’s a crack house right here on Primrose Lane. Let the bastard go home and wonder which neighbor is the invader, which fellow traveler has breached the system. Why do they value it so much? Why do they give their lives over to streets and houses like this? Why do they break their backs to dig into the bosom of a dreamy laugh track only they can hear?

Speer spits out the gum and inserts another piece, lets his saliva turn it moist before he starts to chew. He knows he should have the answer, that the answer should be instinctual, not open to analysis or recall, but simply felt and understood, a reflex, an instantaneous response. The answer should be primal. And the fact that it isn’t is the key to what’s wrong with Speer’s whole life.

They want these streets, these houses, these nests of family life, for a sense of order. Speer should feel this more directly than any of the residents around him. He’s a guardian of order, an overseer. That’s what the Bureau was all about. That’s what Mr. Hoover’s life was all about. These days they try to taint his name, say he had aberrant desires and that he used the Bureau for his own political ends. Beyond being untrue, this has nothing to do with the fact that there are basic rules that must be upheld and enforced. And they’re more precious in the field of communication than anywhere else, as far as Speer is concerned.

And yet, he’s not a part of that network of family life. He’s been married twice. Both unions lasted less than a year and the last one involved a modicum of violence. Neither marriage produced children. For the past six months, Speer has lived in a basement apartment that holds just the faintest trace of a sweet and sour sewer aroma. Speer’s parents are both dead. He has a brother somewhere in the wilds of Manitoba that he hasn’t seen or spoken with in five years.

There are acquaintances, faces that come to him from the set routines of daily life — a waitress, a mechanic, the guy who sells the Spy at the newsstand. But for quite a while now, there have been no friends, and certainly no romance. He’s become a moving recluse, a mobile hermit. A man who defines himself purely by his job.

So, it’s nights like this that keep Speer going, that provide him with a synthetic replacement for the meaning that he assumes is found on streets like this one, in houses like these little ranches. A year ago, the job was a moderate consolation. Tonight it’s everything. It’s the reason to make the bed, drink the coffee, launder the shirts, brush the teeth, pull air into the lungs.

A funny thing about the lungs: Speer quit smoking the day before the last wife, Margie, bolted town with his ’78 Monte Carlo and the whole of their passbook account. If he was going to go back to the unfiltered Camels, it would have been in that crucial five minutes after he read the note she left on the back of an envelope on the kitchen table. Instead, he turned his withdrawal into one more test of will, and in his weaker moments, he played one of those silent, cosmic-wager games. He told himself that if he got through one more day without a smoke, Margie would change her mind and come home. Now he’s hooked on the nicotine gum.

He walks out of the bushes, crosses the street at a normal, unhurried pace, moves into the backyard, and pulls from his pocket a glass cutter and suction cup. He squeezes in behind an azalea bush, finds the kitchen window, uses his elbow to smash in one of the panes, then reaches inside the dark of the kitchen, unlatches the lock, and slides the window open.

He pulls himself inside and there’s this weird, short drop to the sink that he didn’t expect. The seat of his pants gets wet from a small pool of soapy water. He swings his legs off the counter, lowers himself to the floor, and immediately pulls a long-handled flashlight from his coat and snaps it on. He plays the beam around the room twice and the kitchen seems like a stage that’s been abandoned by actors. Speer cups a hand over his mouth, focuses the beam on the kitchen set, lets out a shocked and hand-obscured “Son of a bitch.”

He walks over to the table and stoops slightly to touch one of the chairs. It’s like a set piece for the Snow White story. It’s a miniature, a kid’s play set. But it’s top quality. Nothing plastic or veneer. Heavy, solid wood. He lifts a miniature chair with one hand, guesses at the weight. The kitchen table is only about two feet off the ground. Then he notices that the knickknacks on the walls — the spice rack, the framed needlepoint saying — are all hung at about his belt level. Waist level.

Speer tilts his head back on his neck like he was inspecting the ceiling. He whispers, “Son of a bitch was telling the truth,” then moves into the living room.

There are two recessed, built-in bookcases on either side of a brick fireplace. He shines a light on them both, then moves to the right-hand shelf and pulls out a photo album, a big white wedding album. He flips open to the first page, lets out a laugh, throws his arms out to the sides, and says, “Midgets. Fucking midgets,” as if he’d just come to understand a joke he heard yesterday.

He walks in a slow circle around the room, drumming on his leg with the flashlight, mumbling, “I love this. Goddamn wonderful life. Never a dull moment. Tremendous. Midgets.”

It takes a minute to resign himself to this new element in the night. He assures himself nothing has changed but the scenery, that there’s no reason to alter the procedures, that if anything, this will make the interrogation not only easier but possibly humorous and a little refreshing.

He moves into a hall off the living room, follows it to the master bedroom. It’s the same story — miniature bedroom set, low to the ground, little doll-like bureau and dresser. He opens the closets and inspects the clothing. He expects something garish, overly colorful, and it’s a second before he realizes this is from a lifetime of seeing circus dwarfs perform in red satin tuxes and ballooning clown shoes and patchwork checkerboard pants. But all the outfits in the closet are just smaller versions of everyday suits, slacks, shirts, dresses, shoes, and ties. He feels a little let down by this, a little angry, and he pulls the hanger pole from its socket and lets the whole wardrobe fall to the floor.

He goes to the dresser, pulls each drawer out of the unit, and dumps the contents into a pile on the bed. With one hand, he does a lazy sift through underwear and socks and handkerchiefs and some jewelry. He pockets a gold tie clip with an inlaid emerald and moves out to find the basement door.

The cellar is a genuine museum piece, a classic 1960s rec room, all thin, imitation-walnut paneling and red shag carpet, acoustic tile ceiling and recessed yellow-bulb lighting. There’s a pine wet bar at one end of the room with a glossy black Formica top and a half dozen wooden stools with matching black vinyl seat covers. Set up on the bartop is a row of shot glasses decorated with red-ink cartoon figures and little non sequiturs in quotes. Behind the bar, red and green Christmas tree lights trim a set of shelves that rest on gold-plated brackets. Lining the shelves are two rows of tall, bulky trophies, traditional jobs, big engraved wooden bases with silver side columns supporting silver and gold figures mounted on top. The figures, little humans, men and women, are posed in a variety of dance routines — tango, waltz, tap, jazz.

Next to the bar there’s a big, boxy RCA cabinet stereo that must have gone out of production a quarter-century ago. There’s a plaid wool couch and matching easy chairs, a wrought-iron coffee table with glass top, enormous pop-art ashtrays with corners that wing out at a ridiculous length. There’s a small fireplace against another wall and hung over it is a huge framed poster that gives detailed square-dancing instructions. Leaning against the brick of the fireplace is a miniature set of golf clubs in a lime-green bag. There are dusty red Lava Lites, mismatched end tables covered with bright plastic drink coasters, and a line of hanging plastic multicolored beads to wall off the furnace, oil tank, and water main.

But the real eye-catcher in the room, the only thing that might just be of genuine value, is a classic Philco radio. It’s the kind of big, glossy, stand-up model that was so popular just before World War II. Speer walks over to it, stares at it with his hands in his pockets. He remembers his grandmother had a similar radio when he was a child. He guesses it’s now residing up in Manitoba with the rest of the family legacy.

He turns it on, and, though he actually expects it, he’s a little disturbed that the music that fills the room dates from the same time period as the machine itself, a scratchy monorecorded rendition of “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.” Speer starts to whistle along to the tune, then begins a graceful dance of the hips and shoulders, sort of a sweeping, skating move with hands still planted in pockets. He does this until the song ends, then smiles at himself and moves to the bar to fix himself a drink.

The room makes him want a martini, and all the ingredients are available, even a movie-type ribbed-glass shaker with silver cap. He wishes a mambo would come on the radio so he could do the drink justice. He makes a pitcher’s worth of drinks, pours the first one into a glass that reads One more for the road. And then he spots it — one of those personal putting greens, a four-foot strip of foamy green carpet with a brown plastic electric ball- returner waiting at the end. He immediately carries his drink over to the fireplace, places it on the mantel, and grabs a putter and two Spaldings from the golf bag. He drops the balls to the edge of the green and spends a full minute finding the right grip on the putter. He drops into a stance, lines up, draws back slowly, then gives the ball an easy smack. It misses the white circle that signifies a hole, but rolls into the return socket and gets fired back at him with a pleasing, amplified click-sound.

He loves it. Why doesn’t he own one of these mothers? What a wonderful gift this would make. He grabs his glass, takes a quick sip, lines up a second shot, and putts. This time the ball rolls off the green halfway down the carpet and bounces off the baseboard. Speer responds by flinging the mini-club through the air. It crashes into the wall behind the bar, knocks a trophy to the floor. He takes a breath, moves to the bar, finds the club, picks it up, and lets loose on the remaining trophies, taking wild, unaimed cuts, severing gold and silver dancers from their platforms, gouging wood, cracking columns, until finally all the shelves are cleared.

He picks up the martini shaker, moves to the couch, and starts to sit down when professional intuition kicks in. He gets hold of himself, straightens his tie, brushes down the lapels of his suit, and calmly steps over to the fireplace. He crouches down, makes a fist, pauses, then knocks on the brick fire wall.

“Bingo,” he says, and presses with both hands, first one side of the bricks, then the other. The fire wall turns on a hinge and opens a small passage into another room.

Speer gets down on hands and knees and squeezes through with some difficulty. On the other side, he sits on the floor, annoyed with himself for leaving the flashlight behind. He moves a hand into the air, touches a hanging string, and pulls on it. An overhead bulb clicks on.

He’s inside some sort of small vault, maybe five by five by five, windowless. The walls and ceiling are all blueboard. The floor is unfinished plywood. There are two secretary’s typing chairs, swiveled down to their lowest point. He seats himself in one and rolls forward to a homemade, mix-and-match broadcast board. There are transformers, boosters, monitors, an array of microphones and loose speakers, a turntable, cart machines for prerecorded tape loops, and a stack of labeled carts that read applause, wheezing laughter, raspberry, thunder, whistle, lion roar, sneeze, Chinese gong, car crash #1, car crash #2, fire alarm, breaking glass, monsoon, gunshot, balloon pop, foghorn, slamming door, telephone ring, Tarzan yell, typewriter, and bomb drop — whistle & blast. Nailed to the rear wall is a yellowed photo of Harry Houdini.

Speer looks over the board, begins hitting unlabeled toggle switches until the meters light up and then needles swing up into view. He takes an index card and pen from his suitcoat pocket, finds a volume knob, and gingerly turns it to the right. From the speakers comes a sultry female voice saying, “You’ve got to learn to appreciate your inherent carnality.” He points the pen to the frequency indicator, then transcribes a set of numbers onto the card.

He turns his attention to a large reel-to-reel recorder with a flashing red button labeled timer. He hits the rewind toggle and the tapes spin backward on their axles. He hits stop and then play.

“Here we go,” Speer whispers aloud.

The woman’s voice is replaced by a squeal of feedback, then the static cuts out completely, and after a second of dead air, a laid-back voice announces:

You’re welcome. Don’t mention it. We here at anarchy central agree wholeheartedly. “All-talk radio,” my ass. What they’re handing out here is all babble. Straight from the puppet’s mouth. I’m not saying I got anything better. I’m just saying we’re here to knock them on their asses for a while. So, tell your friends. The rumors are true. We’re ba-a-a-ck.

Speer smiles and says, “So am I, dickhead.”

6

… Well, you’ve been even more libidinously confused than normal tonight. I see my services are needed now more than ever. But the hour is late and my tongue is tired. So, until next time, this is Veronica Wilcox, the diva of deviant delights, saying, fuel the fantasy and keep in touch.

As the close-out theme rises, the regulars in Minnesota immediately start their critiquing of Libido Liveline. Flynn starts to file through bodies, moving out of the crowd, either nodding his head in agreement with their assessments or giving a warm and noncommittal laugh. He won’t argue with even the most ludicrous of criticisms. He’ll simply pat the commentator on the back and move on to more lucid company.

Flynn doesn’t like antagonism. He doesn’t see what it accomplishes, finds it reductive and time-consuming. As a result, he ends up spending a large chunk of all his time in Wireless playing the healer, soothing hurt feelings and trying to build shaky treaties between overly sensitive and cliquish people.

A regular named Frank St. Claire starts to rewind the requisite tape they’ve made of the show and Flynn knows this means the heavy-duty analysis is about to start. They’ll be huddled over the reel-to-reel beyond closing time, replaying the show inch by inch, jotting down notes and thumbing through cross-referenced index cards, debating every word of advice that’s fallen from the lips of the goddess. This is the core cult of Libido Liveline fans, the die-hards, the people who just can’t get enough, whose daily meaning and reason for moving and drawing breath has filtered down to a local radio show.

G.T. squeezes a last few arms on his way to the barber chair. He’s not into the obsessive dissection. As a matter of fact, though he’d never admit it to the fanatics, he’s not even that interested in what Ronnie Wilcox has to say. It’s simply her voice that gets to him. For all he knows, he’d get the same sweet charge, the same addictive chill, just listening to her read from the phone book.

He mounts his throne, the antique, handle-pump, brass-trimmed barber chair that’s located in a dim, cavelike niche in the rear of the bar. It’s from this post that he plays big daddy every night, dispensing love advice, floating loans of up to a C-note and occasionally beyond, reinterpreting a painful quarrel between two edgy friends, confiscating car keys for the overindulgent and offering rides home to all parts of the city. Each night, it’s as if a visit to Flynn’s barber chair is an essential part of the Wireless experience. Newcomers sheepishly approach and shake hands and mumble nicknames. Acquaintances swing by on their way to the rest rooms, dropping the latest radio joke or asking a pop fashion opinion. Novice radio-heads solicit quick quotes on antique sets, while the longtime aficionados settle in for ten- minute debates about recent FCC legislation. The punks come by for a free beer. The tech-heads want a pat on the back for their latest innovations. The amorous seek out an introduction to a newfound prospect. And the simply lonely want any kind of exchange, the basic interplay of human voices.

Flynn supplies it all, every night, and quietly, demurely, revels in it. He’s the main player of Wireless, maybe more essential than either Ferrie or Most. Tonight’s no exception to the tradition. Over the course of a half hour he sees most of the congregation. Hazel cruises by to ask if she can borrow his car next week and he smiles and assures her mi Saab es su Saab. Jimmy Donato hits him up for a twenty to lay on an upcoming round of nine ball and Flynn slides him a crisp, new bill. Jojo Mehlman needs some bolstering over the brutal divorce he’s wading through and Flynn goes to work, assuring a quick resolution and predicting lines of new women by spring. Norris Christianson has a need to recount the graphic details of his recent proctosigmoidoscopy and Flynn nods gravely and sympathizes over the strange ways of the lower digestive tract. Everybody seems to have a problem tonight. Laurie Geneva is convinced her new husband the dentist is slamming that bitch hygienist and Flynn assures her Graham would never do this. Nina Texier, lead guitarist for the industrial-funk band Grammatology, has sprained her wrist and Flynn recommends a specialist who owes him a favor and won’t charge her. A three-hundred-pound bald guy, known only as Dix, relays his recent problems with the licensing commission and Flynn promises he’ll make a call to Counselor Donaghue.

For the next half hour, they come like pilgrims to the barber chair, some edgy and some smashed and some angry, but most just anxious for five minutes of G.T.’s time. Does it ever bother him that no one comes offering a favor? Flynn knows that’s not the nature of the game. It’s not the posture he’s assumed and besides, he doesn’t need any favors. He’s more than content just being able to pass them out.

As Dix waddles away, Flynn smiles to see the next visitor is one of his favorites. Gabe is probably also the youngest regular at Wireless, maybe about fifteen years old. In the beginning, Ferrie got a little nervous when he found the underage kid next to Flynn at the bar. But Flynn calmed him down by hinting at friends on the liquor board and Gabe has now become not only a regular but one of Hazel’s inner circle. On this score, Flynn feels a bit ambiguous. Hazel’s people are young and it’s good Gabe can hang with people close to his own age. But some part of G.T. wanted to keep the kid pure, shield him, at least for a short while, from the political feuding of the jammers.

Like Hazel and himself, Flynn knows Gabe doesn’t have much in the line of family. He’s a mulatto out of someplace on the border of the Canal Zone. And, unfortunately, when he gets the least bit excited, he’s overtaken by a siege of stuttering. Lately, though, Flynn’s noticed that the boy’s speech seems to improve when he’s around Hazel. And for that reason alone, he can’t bring himself to discourage the enormous case of infatuation he’s seen build up over the past couple of months. Gabe’s got it bad for Hazel, a classic case of puppy love, a schoolboy crush of painful scope.

Flynn studies him now, slouched in the adjoining chair, ignoring the slick skateboarding magazine that Flynn brought him. The kid’s staring across the room to where Hazel is holding court with her muscle-boy, Eddie, and two new faces, possibly new recruits to the clique.

“Another Moxie?” Flynn asks, but Gabe shakes him off without looking over.

Finally he says, “I ga-ga-gotta take a piss,” and slides out of the chair.

Gabe has to wait ten minutes before the men’s room is completely empty. Then he stands in front of the wall mirror, brings his face close until his nose is just about touching the glass, and slowly, methodically, begins to make a series of exaggerated shapes with his mouth, rounding it into a huge “O,” pulling in the lower lip and clamping it with his teeth. He only gets a minute or so before someone comes in, then he exits and drifts through the crowd for a while.

Gabe wishes he could line everyone up, the whole jammer circle. Both factions. Even Wallace Browning and the old boys. Even Billy J, the little midget shithead. He wishes he could take on Flynn’s voice and relaxed confidence. He wishes he could mimic Hazel’s attitude and her courage. He’d even take Wallace’s knowledge of jamming history and the wisdom that comes with it. And he wishes he could put all these attributes together into a single lecture, one full-blown, attention-freezing speech of a lifetime.

He’d wake the jammers up. He’d speak slowly, but with force. And he’d never once stutter. He’d speak until they came to, until they saw the simplicity of his words. Until they gave up their chokeholds on all these specific, particular ideas, all this political and philosophical crap, all this art shit, and just started to think about the group, the people who sit elbow-to-elbow every night at Wireless. The crowd that he once heard Flynn call the family.

But Gabe’s only fifteen years old and he’s too confused to even begin understanding why everything feels like it’s falling apart at Wireless. He feels he shouldn’t be in this position, that as the youngest jammer, he should be exempt from the infighting. He should be cared for, looked after a little. He knows Hazel would be annoyed at thoughts like this. Maybe more than annoyed, more like ashamed. But this is how he genuinely feels, that a sense of place and belonging has to count more than a sense of independence. At least at fifteen, when every hormone in his body is pushing and prodding him and five times a day he feels like his head could tear loose from his shoulders and launch itself into orbit.

When Gabe was five years old, his old man left for a two-week hunting trip and never came home. The hunting buddy turned out to be a waitress named Denise. Gabe’s ma filed for divorce a year later and had to go back to night work as a projectionist at Herzog’s Erotic Palace. Gabe was raised by a string of impatient cousins and, now and then, hired sitters.

He tries not to think much about his father these days. He tries not to think about what a normal childhood might have been like. He tries to focus on Wireless — how he can learn from Flynn. How he can be of help to Hazel. He knows his feelings for Hazel are, at best, unrealistic. But how do you turn off a crash of this magnitude? How do you simply will yourself not to care?

Gabe looks across the room to Flynn, still seated in the brass and red leather confessional, whispering calming words into the ear of a weeping young woman.

A regular named Chatman comes up behind Flynn and says into his ear, “Ferrie wants to see you in the basement,” then moves away quickly.

Flynn wades through the crowd to the front of the club, slides behind the bar, unlocks the cellar door, and starts down the stairs into the dim and musty air below. Immediately, the environment changes. The walls at his side are now rough and bulging natural boulders mortared together and caked with a century’s worth of silt and soot. The stairs beneath his feet are an ancient, creaky wood. And even the air seems to come from some decay-plagued era that everyone’s forgotten.

Coming off the bottom step, Flynn plants his foot in a pool of cold water and lets out a fast, overly loud, “Shit.”

From somewhere deeper in the basement, Ferrie yells, “It’s flooded a little.”

“Timely advice,” Flynn mutters.

“Who’s there?” Ferrie calls.

“Thought police,” Flynn yells. “We’ve got your mother. Come out slowly.”

“Senor Flynn,” Ferrie yells back. “I’m down with the antiques.”

Flynn doesn’t know how the man can spend so much time in this cellar. Every time Most sends him down for a crate of vodka, he disappears for an hour. Flynn thinks of the cellar as an enormous tomb, a dank mausoleum that seems to fill with water every time it rains. The cellar is divided into dozens of chambers or “vaults,” as Ferrie tends to call them. There’s a wide center aisle that runs from the front of the factory to the back, unobstructed, then dead-ends into a woodshed area that spans the width of the building. Off this center aisle are small rooms, little storage areas partitioned by scrap wood and sometimes chicken wire. Most of these storage chambers are empty, but a few are still crammed to capacity with crates and cartons and naked bales of rolled wire, ancient stock and supplies abandoned by the factory’s owners when the place went under.

Flynn moves to the first vault and looks in. Under the glare of a mesh-caged light bulb, hanging from a hook in the rafter above, sits Ferrie behind a long redwood picnic table. He’s seated in an old-fashioned wooden swivel chair that tilts to one side. His feet are propped up on a slotted crate to keep them out of the puddle of water beneath the table. Behind him, mounted on the wall, is a large Peg-Board fitted with old fuse boxes and newer circuit breakers — the electrical wiring for the whole building. The table itself is covered with an eclectic selection of antique radios. Flynn spots Philcos and Farasworths, Crosleys and Stewart-Warners, and at least one old Fairbanks-Morse that he’d guess dates from the late thirties.

Flynn tiptoes deeper into the room until he finds a dry mound of earth to stand on. Then he just digs his hands into his pants pockets and smiles at Ferrie.

Ferrie has a cheap red plastic fishing tackle box open in his lap. It’s filled not with lures but with small hand tools, tweezers and small pliers and wire strippers. A half dozen other tools are scattered on the picnic table around the old radios. And, unbelievably, in the midst of a hundred years’ worth of dirt and soot, there’s a spray can of Lemon Pledge furniture polish and a thick chamois buffing cloth.

Flynn puts his hand to his forehead and says, “Ferr, if you love these units so much, why do you leave them down here in this rat hole?”

Ferrie stares at him for a few seconds and finally, in a whisper, says, “Usually no one but me comes down here.”

“Yeah, with good reason.”

“It’s not so bad when you get used to it. Pretty peaceful, really.”

“That’s the last word I’d go for. I hate it down here.”

“Rough on the suits?”

“We had a basement like this where I grew up. I was in it all the time. It took in water, just like this place. God, the smell down here …”

“Why’d you go in the basement if you hated it?” Ferrie asks.

Flynn ignores him. “I heard you wanted to see me. Good news or bad? I already talked to Hazel. I put out the fire—”

“Good news. Interesting news.”

“You got another lead for me? That liquor salesman was a dog, you know. I bought the geek a steak down at Winchester’s, he tells me over dessert he’s looking for cheap term but no one will write him ’cause this genetic heart thing—”

“Forget business, G.T. She’s in here. Tonight.”

“She?”

Ferrie gives up a self-satisfied nod.

“Who’s in here tonight?”

Ferrie closes his mouth, lets a smile cut larger across his face.

Flynn comes upright, furrows his brows, gives a “get out of here” mock-annoyed grin.

“Five minutes ago. Most was behind the bar. Woman comes in. Not a regular. Never seen her before. Very stylish. A presence. She orders a mescal. Bang. The voice. Most almost falls over. She gives him a look—don’t give me away, help me out here. He swears to me it’s her.”

Flynn’s heart speeds up. “Where is she?” he says.

Ferrie shrugs. “Took the drink and blended into the crowd. Most is already starting to doubt himself. You know how that happens. You’re sure of something and then five minutes later you’re not.”

“What direction did she go in?”

“She just went into the crowd. You don’t know what she looks like, do you? I’ve seen a photo, but the die-hards all say it’s a decoy—”

“Most give you a description?”

“I didn’t ask. It was the voice that killed him, you know?”

“I know.”

Flynn starts out of the chamber and up the stairs.

“What?” Ferrie yells after him. “You’re going to talk to every woman in here?”

7

The Volvo pulls up under the winged portico of the Baron Quinsigamond, and two carhops, a man and a woman, jump into action. They pull open doors, give a small bow with the head, and offer an arm to help Olga and Wallace extract themselves from the front seat.

Olga straightens the crocheted shawl around her shoulders and smiles up at the young Hispanic woman, presses a five into her hand, and takes from her the pink parking stub for validation. She walks around the front of the car and takes Wallace’s arm, brings her mouth to his ear, and says, “We’re going to break some records tonight. I can feel it.”

They enter the hotel lobby with the saunter of self-imposed nobility. The Baron is already a decade old, but has lost none of its impressiveness. It’s got that top-of-the-franchise feel to it. None of the old Mickey Mouse stuff that used to pass for traveler accommodations here in Quinsigamond. This place has the big open lobby with the hanging crystal chandelier, the rooftop revolving restaurant, the health club and pool. And most of all, the beautiful, crushed-velvet, mauve uniforms worn by the staff. Wallace thinks, You know you’re in a big-money place when the bellboy’s thighs whistle.

A tall, bony-faced woman in a black satin evening gown says, “Mr. and Mrs. Browning, we’ve been expecting you.”

She takes each of them by the hand, smiles down at them.

“Just like the president and secretary to be late,” Wallace says.

Olga does a practiced eye roll. “Don’t listen to him, Magda. Wallace likes to make an entrance.”

Magda gives a just-as-practiced laugh and says, “I think you’ll find everything you requested. I can tell you the ice sculpture is a big hit. Table One has been asking for you. Now, if you need anything at all, just ask for Aldo or myself.”

“I’m sure it’s all perfect,” Olga says.

“Did the drummer make it?” Wallace asks. “They said yesterday there could be a problem with the drummer.”

Magda puts a hand on his shoulder. “He’s been punctuating all of Mr. Dixon’s jokes.”

Wallace brings a hand up to his forehead like a migraine’s just exploded over the eyes. “Oh my God, honey, we’d better get in there. Dixon is trying to play emcee again.”

“Have a wonderful night,” Magda says, then lowers her voice. “You’re the odds-on favorite to bring home the gold.”

Olga takes Wallace’s arm and they walk through the lobby and veer left into the Duchess Ballroom. Hanging over the entryway is a crimson banner that reads:

Q.L.P.L. 19

And underneath, the explanation:

Quinsigamond Little People’s Lodge 19

Eighth Annual Dinner Dance

They stop in the entryway, directly underneath the banner, survey the room, and let the crowd observe their arrival.

“Oh, honey, Magda outdid herself this year,” Olga says softly.

“You pay for the best …” Wallace responds, and starts to wave at the crowd.

From the other side of the room, a voice yells, “Our fearless leader made it.”

Wallace cups his hands around his mouth and yells back, “No more of the punch for Dixon,” then gives a “yer out” sign with thumb and swinging arm. There’s some laughter and a rim-shot drumbeat. Assured of the room’s attention, Wallace takes Olga’s arm and they start to move through the crowd toward the head table, patting backs and grabbing extended hands along the way.

The room is a sight. All the chrome and gold plating has been polished immaculate. The bandstand is lit professionally with multicolored spots for the slow numbers. There’s an ice sculpture, a huge four-foot swan, neck turned as if in the midst of a vision. They’ve remembered the fresh-cut flowers, the hundreds of helium balloons, the crepe paper and streamers. There’s the train of gleaming aluminum Sterno carts for the endless buffet. And, thank God, Magda was able to rent enough of the special-order tables and chairs, custom-designed for formal dwarf functions.

Now Magda just has to pray that Wallace triumphs at the dance contest. She can only hope the band, the locally famous Les Roberts Quintet, will supply the tunes he likes, the ones that allow him to show his best moves. The odds are that Wallace and Olga will walk out with the night’s biggest trophy. They usually do. If not, she knows Olga already appreciates the extra effort. But Wallace is another story. Three and a half feet of tough customer.

She watches him as he moves toward the head table, an instinctive politician, a crowd handler, an image pro. His stature is inconsequential. He knows how to maneuver within the heart of the mob. He knows when to go with the joke and when to plunge into soulful earnestness. He knows when to smile, when to roll the eyes, when to grimace, and when to drop the salty tear to the cheekbone. And like all creatures who know how to use these tools to optimum advantage, Wallace is, at his core, a cold and ruthless device, a machine for goal attainment.

He reaches Table One, seats Olga, then lingers for a moment behind his own chair, an arm stretched upward to recognize someone supposedly toward the rear of the room. Then he settles in at the table with a greeting for each of his dinner companions.

“So, Al,” he says, “will we be having some fun tonight?”

“Don’t we always, Wallace,” Al says. “I just hope you and the missus cleared some room in the trunk for all the metal you’ll be hauling out of here tonight.”

The table laughs its agreement and approval and Wallace nods and says, “I put on the lucky shoes. The feet have no excuse.”

There’s a second chorus of laughter and Wallace feels a hand on his shoulder. Before he can turn to greet his visitor, he sees the fright on Olga’s face and knows it’s Billy J. These younger kids have no sense of timing or manners. He was just getting the table off the ground.

Wallace pushes his chair back and says, “Excuse me for just a sec. Kitchen problem, I’m sure.”

Billy J works as a busboy at the Baron. He’s dressed in a double-breasted white cotton busing jacket decorated with fading gravy stains. Wallace takes Billy J by the elbow, gives a squeeze that he hopes will leave a bruise in the morning, and moves the youngest member of his inner circle over near the bandstand where they can talk privately.

“You’ve got all the polish of a carnival act, you little putz.”

Billy J puts on the hurt eyes and swallows down the last of his drink.

“I’ve been trying to call you all day,” he says.

“Olga and I were practicing. We never take calls when we’re practicing.”

“Jeez, Fred and Ginger here—”

“Okay, Mr. Smart Mouth, what’s the big emergency that you have to pull me away from dinner?”

“I was down Wireless last night—”

“Something new?”

“Hazel was in. We got talking—”

“A regular miracle.”

“Hey, you want to know?”

“Come on, come on.”

“You want to know?”

“Yes, Billy, I want to know.”

“Hazel says, and I told you this would happen, you go back two months, I told you this. She says, they’re going to break, they’re going to splinter off. They want nothing to do with us, Wallace.”

Wallace looks down at his shoes, custom-made in the Philippines, just now at that perfect holding pattern between broken in and wearing out. He shakes his head slightly, lets just enough of a smile spread over his lips so that it looks like an unsuccessful attempt to suppress his amusement.

“What,” Billy says, “this is funny to you?”

“First of all,” Wallace says in a lowered voice, “this is not the time nor the place and you should know that by now. More importantly, and once again, you speak without thinking. You open your mouth and dump everything out, without bothering to think. I don’t know why I make an effort with you—”

Billy is stunned and his face shows it. “I don’t get it,” he says. “This doesn’t bother you? This news doesn’t upset you?”

He cups Billy around the back of the neck. “I pray that someday before I die, just once, you’ll learn to look for a bigger picture. You think that’ll ever happen?”

“I just don’t get it.”

“Think now, Billy. What are we at heart? You and I?”

Billy’s terrified of a wrong answer and his fear makes it difficult to concentrate. He decides he has to go with the obvious and says, “Dwarfs.”

Wallace gives him a sharp, open-palmed slap to the cheek, so fast he hopes that even if any of the guests witnessed it, they’ll spend the night questioning their vision.

“You infuriate me, you little bastard.”

Billy cowers, hangs his head, wishes the band would start playing.

“We’re anarchists, you schmuck. Remember that word, Billy? Did you read even one of the books I bought for you?”

Billy prays he’s not required to answer.

“Anarchists don’t wear uniforms, Billy. Anarchists can’t worry about splinter groups. We are a splinter group, for Christ sake. We’re antiunity, we’re antiregulatory. We’re goddamn anarchists.”

“Listen,” Billy says, avoiding eye contact. “There are more strangers down Wireless every week. Everybody’s getting nervous. Nobody knows who could be what, okay? The Spy says the FCC’s all pissed off. You think we need a bunch of people all hot to blow things up? You think we need them out there bringing heat down on us?”

“Now, you lower your voice right now, mister. There’re a lot of friends here who would not think too much of our little hobby. Now, I will deal with Hazel and her people. That’s not your problem. I will square Hazel and company away. But I want you to burn this into your memory, Billy: don’t you ever, ever, never again, approach me at an affair like this to discuss anything to do with jamming. Do you understand me, Billy?”

Olga’s concerned. She’s half-turned in her chair, head-motioning for Wallace to return. But surprisingly, Billy’s a little stubborn. He says, “I just think we got some problems starting up here.”

Wallace leans in toward him and says, “Son, you wouldn’t know a problem if it pulled out a sword and sliced off your ear.”

8

Flynn heads for the rear of Wireless, beyond the pool tables. He realizes the best course of action is a logical one, something planned and systematic — divide the room into geometric blocks and eliminate them one by one, a steady pace, a thorough search. All he’d have to hear would be hello; even get lost could confirm or deny. His ears could play polygraph. He’d know the truth the second the sound penetrated down the canal, impacted on the drum, one syllable, even in the midst of this bar din, the brain could tell him— Veronica.

But, as always, his body won’t cooperate. It insists on being erratic, patternless. His eyes spot possible women by their likely age, but they won’t stay focused on the subject long enough for his intuition to react one way or another. He ends up randomly moving in big sweeping circles, only occasionally singling someone out, pumping them for a response, a word, a way to know. He hears Fuck off, Hello again, Flynn, Excuse me, and I’m with someone. He starts coming up from behind, placing his hand on shoulders and the backs of necks. Mostly, he gets glares or confused looks. He turns down a single offer to dance.

He’s about to head back to the bar, grill Most for any piece of information — eye color, length of hair, height — but he’s stopped by the voice as he passes his antique barber chair against the wall.

She says, “You look lost.”

What he’s hit with is something very close to fear. He looks down to his feet for a second, suddenly not sure he wants to know what she looks like. The classic pilgrim, willing to search for years, but terrified to end the pilgrimage.

Like leaping into ice water, he makes himself do it without thinking. He brings his head up, stares directly at her face. It’s hard to say that she’s just what he’s imagined, since he’s imagined a wide variety of possibilities. But she is beautiful. That part of the projection isn’t compromised at all. Her hair is shorter than he’d expected, darker. She’s a bit smallerboned than her voice indicates, but not delicate. Her eyes are deep blue — he’d pictured them brown or green. Her skin is as pale as he’d thought. He’s always imagined her inside, artificially lit, and though he’s never thought about this before, he knows now, in this instant, this is because he often hears the voice late at night, at home, enclosed himself, wrapped up under a blanket in the dentist’s chair.

He widens his angle, takes in the full body, wonders if there’s any significance to the fact that she’s in his barber chair, tilted back, almost the same angle he falls into when listening to her show. He likes the way she’s dressed, the short black suede skirt and the white silk blouse. It’s a style he’s pictured, sensual and hip and completely fitting.

“Some nights,” he says, “you just can’t get on track.”

She reaches over, pats the seat of an empty chair next to her. The pilgrim’s chair. He hesitates, then climbs in, lets his hand fall down to touch the tilt lever, but refrains from pulling, stays upright.

“So,” she says, “know where I can get a secure annuity? Maybe some exceptional life with a reducing premium? I’m a nonsmoker.”

It works. He’s caught off guard and he lets his face show it. He recovers with a forced laugh and says, “I’m at a disadvantage here—”

She cuts him off. “C’mon, G.T. I thought we’d save some time by not lying to each other. This place closes in less than an hour.”

He shrugs. “Yeah, well, the inner core can stay as long as they want.”

“The inner core? Is that what you are?”

“One of many. Can I ask how you know me?”

“I don’t want to get too specific. I’ve got a lot of fans, you know? Lot of teenage boys, little hackers, up all night in their bedrooms, just my voice and the light from their P.C.’s. It’s weird. It gets so there’s this language, this verbal shorthand between you and your hard-core listeners. You just refer to something, ask a question, and bang — they’re calling the station with more than you want to know.”

“You asked about me? On the air? I’m a pretty constant listener, you know—”

“Oh, I can imagine.”

“And I never heard any mention—”

“I’ve got an inner core, too. Lots of ways to communicate in this town.”

“You know, Ronnie, you wanted to buy life insurance, all you had to do was look in the yellow pages.”

“And if I want to find out who’s been knocking my station off the air? What directory do I look in then?”

He flinches, genuinely surprised by the comment. “That’s how I came up? You think I’ve been jamming QSG? Some kid gave you my name as the jammer?”

“So, this would be a denial?”

“Who told you this? Who gave you my name?”

“Oh, c’mon, please, Mr. Flynn—”

He lets his head fall back in the chair till he’s looking at the tin-plated ceiling. He lets out a low whistle, shakes his head slightly.

“I’ve wanted to meet you for a year now. You know that?”

“Yeah, you fit the fan demographics.”

“I’m not a fan—”

“You say it like it’s an insult …”

“There’s a certain mentality—”

“As opposed to jammers?”

“Mizz, I don’t know what you’re referring to. I don’t know the meaning of that word.”

“You come here for the ambience? You’re into nuclear deco?”

“I’m just another blues fan.”

“Oh, a music lover—”

“Exactly.”

“But my show’s all-talk.”

“I make exceptions. And you’ve sort of got a bluesy style.”

“You know, Flynn, I’m not a radio cop or something. I just wanted to ask why, see if we could work out an arrangement.”

“An arrangement?”

“I’m not here to nail you or something. You know that, right?”

“I’m not the guy. I’m not the person you’re interested in.”

“Would there be any chance you’d know who I should talk to?”

He stares at her for a while until she breaks a nervous smile, then he gets out of the chair, takes a step away, and says, “This figures.”

She leans forward, reaches out, and takes his coat sleeve.

“You’re leaving?”

He stops, bounces slightly on the balls of his feet, steps back in toward her.

“I wait a year, keep myself from finding out about you. Concentrate on the voice—”

“You and fifty thousand others. According to last week’s book, anyway.”

“—keep you in the dream. But it won’t work. My luck. The dream has to mug me. From behind. In my own bar.” He takes a breath, lowers his voice, but retains the testiness. “I didn’t knock out your pathetic station. And I don’t know who did. And if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you. End of story.”

“Honor among thieves. How trite.”

“Who’s a thief?” Flynn asks. “What was stolen?”

“Airtime.”

“How do you own airtime?”

“What do you mean, how do you own it? You purchase it. You buy a license. You sign a contract. Hey, Mr. Life Insurance, you familiar with these terms?”

“See, you can’t trust the voice. It never works. I took you to be smarter than this.”

“Moving right along. Is this the part where we start to insult each other? Tell me when to throw my drink.”

“Okay, fine. What can I say? I’m not your man. You got bad information. Hazard of our age.”

“I’m just curious, you know,” Ronnie says. “I mean, what’s the big attraction? Why would someone want to waste their time jamming radio stations?”

Flynn shrugs and shakes his head. “I can only speculate.”

“Please do.”

“My guess is there’s probably a lot of different motivations. Some of them probably feel powerless and frustrated and somehow they stumbled on this little hobby to compensate. You know, hit the big boys. Others are probably just old-time practical jokers. And then I’d guess there are the egos, right? They do it ’cause they can. ’Cause it’s complicated and technical, and they know how. I don’t know.”

She nods, lifts her drink to mock-toast him, gulps down the rest of the mescal, hands him the empty glass.

“Last question. I’ll frame it hypothetically since you’re not familiar with the people involved. If you were a jammer, why would you spare my show? What’s so special about Libido Liveline?”

“You’ve got an army of horny adolescents at your heels and you’re asking me that question?”

“I need a more worldly opinion, someone closer to my own perceptions. A peer.”

“You’re making a lot of assumptions there—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just answer the question. Take a stab.”

Flynn shrugs. “For Christ sake, you heard the guy yourself. I’d take what he said at face value. He finds everything else on your station babble. That means he must find some value to your show.”

“I guess,” Ronnie says, “that’s what I’m looking for. How he defines that value.”

“You’d have to find the guy and ask him. And I can’t help you in that department, whether you believe me or not.”

Ronnie lifts her arms up over her head in a slow stretch. Flynn wishes he had a drink, then wishes that he’d never left the house tonight, that he’d told Wallace and Hazel to settle their own differences.

Her hands come down, run through her hair. She gives a smile and says, “Forget it,” and then adds, “Want to go for a ride?”

They end up at the airport, the old one, abandoned but undemolished for a decade now. They sit in Ronnie’s Jeep, passing her flask of mescal back and forth like a slow-motion Ping-Pong game. As they talk, they stare out at the ghosttown terminal, every window shattered, all doors missing. The landing strips are a gritty museum of frost heaves and potholes, brown weed shooting up through every cracked parcel of cement. In the deserted section of parking lot where they drink, dozens of giant spikish halogen lamps have all been dented in near the base, like someone with a drivable wreck and a lot of undirected hostility has rammed them at cruising speed, caused them to bend over as if eternally racked by shooting ulcer pain.

Flynn knows he’s getting more drunk than he intended, but that it’s necessary if the night is to progress somewhere, if some percentage of his fantasy can be brought back.

The booze doesn’t seem to hit Ronnie. Her voice stays constant, changeless in tone and volume. This could be a byproduct of her profession, Flynn thinks, but it’s more likely she’s got a high tolerance from some steady practice. She’s been telling him stories from her youth, vignettes sort of, little glimpses that may have a point or lesson that he’s missing. She’s let him in on her mother’s many husbands, her bizarre teenage crush on Walter Cronkite, and, most of all, her required research into the intricacies of human sexuality in all its varied masks.

“The thing is,” she says, pausing to take the flask from him and fire a double, “I realized early on, I just instinctively under-stood, the need for specialization. You want to take a guess how many straight talk shows there are out there? Answer — too many. And it’s been that way for a long time. They come and go. It gets boring fast. You know this. I’m not telling you anything new. So you have to zero in. You have to find the collective pulse and tap it, give it the jolt it’s waiting for. Whether it knows it or not. Okay, you can go politics, like old Ray at the station. Do I need to say more? Listen to Ray. No humor. No sensitivity. Literal-minded. No feeling for the audience. You end up exclusively with the fanatics. I know what you’re thinking. No fanatics like the ones you find in Libido-land. Okay, true to a point. But what I’ve found is that your fanatics in this department, and only in this department, cut across the whole spectrum. Race, creed, age. Economic, geographic, sociopolitical. The whole shebang. We’re all fanatics, Flynn. You are a fanatic, Mr. Flynn. We’re all pioneers, willing or not.”

Flynn shakes his head, holds back a laugh. “I’m sorry. I know you’re the expert here, but your thinking is dated. No one’s obsessed with sex anymore—”

“Hold up. Stop. You’re confused. You’re misreading symptoms. Our obsession’s gone back underground, below the skin. We’re back to the age of suppression. It’s cyclical, like everything else in history. We’re into appearance again. Governmental mores. It’s an epidemic mentality. Combined with backlash. You just have to take my word on this.”

“Well, like you say, Ray’s been getting bumped regularly, but you seem sacred.”

“My show. My show seems sacred.”

Flynn smiles. “Same difference, right?”

“I don’t think so. The show is more than just me. There has to be an exchange, an interplay. A caller. It’s essential. Old story. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It’s the big picture that the brothers like.”

“The brothers?”

She holds her mouth over the nozzle of the flask, gives him an impatient look, refuses to speak.

“What?” he says.

“Please. Let’s say you are just the neighborhood life insurance guy. Let’s say that. You don’t read the Spy? You didn’t notice the little article about the patron saints of the city’s jammers? Why does this have to be such a bitch?”

He takes the flask from her, decides that maybe drunk is the best way to go at this point. He goes to upend it, then says, “We’re out.”

“More in the glove box.”

He pulls out a fresh pint, cracks the seal, offers her the first hit, which she takes.

“Okay, fine,” he says, “yes, I read the article. First off, it was pretty ill informed—”

“Correct my misconceptions.”

He ignores the interruption. “The point is, and you should know this better than anyone, right? The beauty of radio is the anonymity. Anybody can broadcast. And anybody can call themselves James and John—”

“Weren’t you listening tonight? They came right out and said ‘O’Zebedee.’”

“Anybody can call themselves O’Zebedee.”

“You’re saying someone’s framing them. That it’s not the real thing.”

He sighs, takes back the bottle. “I’m not even saying that, really. I guess I’m saying that’s one possibility.”

“What’s your opinion?”

He waits awhile before saying, “My opinion is that maybe we should head back to the bar.”

She slouches down in her seat. “I was going to give you a tour of the terminal.”

He looks out at the decayed building. “You make a habit of coming up here?”

“When I need to think.”

“Could be a little dangerous, couldn’t it?”

“I’ve never had a problem. It’s a great place. It’s like walking around in a dream.”

“You’re nuts. There are probably rats in there.”

She laughs. “There are no rats.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Flynn says, and reaches to the dash and turns on the radio. But instead of tuning in QSG, he slides down the band until he comes to some subdued, bluesy sax music, just an old-fashioned kind of tenor melody with a strong bass line, no strings or orchestra crap. Very simple. Two people in a dark room, hunched into their instruments.

They both sit back in silence for a few minutes. The tune goes on and on and finally Ronnie says, in spite of herself, “This is great,” and then, coming forward, adds, “I’ve got an even better idea.”

She rolls her window all the way down, turns the volume up slightly, snaps on the headlights, then pulls up the door latch and climbs outside. Flynn watches her motion to him through the windshield, gets out of the Jeep, and joins her in the shine of the headlights. She faces him, bites down on a smile, takes him by the wrists, and directs his hands around her waist. She starts to dance, this slow, unstructured sway, mostly hip movement. He goes along with it and they fall into the rhythm of the song, pick up some pace, join their bodies closer together. They begin to experiment, laughing slightly, more surprised than embarrassed.

She leans into him, brings her head up near his ear, and says, “It’s true, you know, you concentrate on the music and it just gets easier.”

He indulges himself, gives her a mobile hug, runs a hand up into her hair.

“It’s weird,” he says, “in the headlights.”

“We could use some fog.”

“Maybe a little rain. Little drizzle.”

She rests her head against his shoulder. He turns her and she looks out at the landing strip. The Jeep’s headlights screen their shadows onto the tarmac, elongated giants swaying, long waves of spectral nomads blowing over the desert. Some wind starts up, moves scrap along the lot, makes a gushing noise through the terminal that adds something to the saxophone.

She says, “I used to watch that movie all the time when I was young. Sidney Poitier and Lulu. Remember the scene where they danced? I always wanted to dance like that.”

“With Poitier?”

“Or someone like him.”

Flynn leans in, puts his lips to her neck.

“But this is pretty good. This is okay.”

She begins to slow-dance him backward in the direction of the Jeep until he’s backed against the hood and the dancing fades into a tight, full-body embrace. His mouth moves around her neck, sucking and licking, and he feels her buck a little, her back arch out and her arms press into him. The pace of their hands and mouths speeds up as if their fingers and lips can’t decide where to land. She’s pushing into him, his back is against the grille, the Jeep taking his weight, his ass sliding down toward the bumper. He’s in a crouched, almost-sitting position, slightly below her. Ronnie shifts position, moves her legs outside his. She reaches down, starts to rub him, and hears his breathing immediately go shallow, almost as if she’s hurt him. She hesitates and he says, “No,” in a clipped, too-high pitch. She starts to fumble with his belt buckle and zipper, too anxious. He runs his hands up her thighs, lifting her skirt, coming around and squeezing her behind. He rises up slightly off the bumper and she manages to pull his pants free with a series of clumsy yanks. He pushes his face into the crook of her neck, slides into her, and the noises begin, clogged moans from an adamantly sealed mouth. She rocks backward, holding onto his shoulders, finds a rhythm, a midtempo wave that can build. His arms are locked around her waist and she can feel his feet sliding a bit in the gravel. She starts to blow out quick breaths, trying for control, typical, not wanting to give away any sound. It goes on like this for a couple of minutes, Flynn getting slightly louder, easing his head back finally, his eyes closed, his bottom lip held down by his upper teeth.

Then he shocks her by jumping up into a standing position, still managing to stay in her, bear-hugging her below her belt line. He’s frantic, dipping at his waist until her legs, locked around his back, tilt to the sky. It’s like some old 1950s sodashop dance move, poodle skirts sent sailing to a Buddy Holly tune. He does it again and again, bending, bowing in a sweeping plunge, then reversing, coming upright, actually tilting backward a bit.

Ronnie locks in, tightens her legs around him, closes her eyes, holds close to his chest. And begins a low-throated, rumbling moan, a keening kind of suppressed wail. She catches herself, goes into some shallow breaths, but it doesn’t matter, he’s drowning her out with this final series of dream-like yips, a speedy litany of identical monotones that sounds like an Oriental parrot.

When he finishes, he maneuvers a slow fall to the ground and they lie there for a while, still interlocked and breathing heavy just underneath the smoky beams of the headlights.

After a while, when he catches his breath, Flynn says, “So, would I make it on Libido Liveline?”

Ronnie laughs and runs a hand over his face, feels the sweat cooling in the November air.

“I’ll tell you, Flynn,” she says, “you’re going to need some private practice.”

9

Wallace pulls the Volvo into the garage and as the door comes down behind them, Olga says, “It just wasn’t our night, honey. It wasn’t meant to be.”

He shakes off her consolation. “Entirely my fault. I couldn’t concentrate.” He cuts the engine and adds, “Though, God knows, the band’s been better.”

They enter the house and start to turn on lights. Olga knows she won’t feel the full brunt of Wallace’s disappointment until tomorrow. Overnight, the excuses and bitterness will breed, multiply like cancer cells, colonize the whole of his brain and larynx. And in a way, she’s grateful for the short reprieve. She’s just too tired tonight to comfort him, to agree with his assessment of the poor drumming and song selection.

Wallace undoes his tie and says, “Let’s just check on the taping and then get some sleep.”

Olga follows him down into the basement. They both cry out at the same time when they see the pile of demolished trophies at the foot of the stairs.

A voice comes back at them, a broken echo, “Somehow I don’t think I’m in Kansas anymore.”

They stare at each other. Olga waits for directions — should she run, call the police, find a weapon of some kind?

“Fred, Ginger, get your tiny little asses down here.”

Wallace closes his eyes for a long second and when he opens them it looks as if he’ll cry. Instead, he starts down the rest of the stairs and his wife follows, stepping over a mound of broken male and female dancers, silver and gold arms, legs, heads strewn into a mismatched grave, a figurine pyre waiting for a temperature that can melt metal.

Speer is lounging on the couch, half-drunk, reclining down its length, head on an embroidered pillow, shoes kicked off and legs inclined upward resting on the back. His Smith & Wesson is on the coffee table as natural as a bowl of hard candies, as if he were daring someone to make a grab for it. Olga and Wallace come around the corner and stand in front of him.

“Hey, hey,” he yells, “circus is in town.”

Wallace hopes Olga will stay quiet, but like she reads his mind and willfully opposes it, she blurts out, “Who are you?”

Speer comes upright on the couch and says, “You know exactly who I am. You’ve been waiting for me since day one. Jesus, you are adorable, aren’t you? Kind of like a puppy. In the mall, you know. Just want to take it home.”

“Some identification?” Wallace says, trying to pull the attention onto himself.

Speer smiles, picks up his gun, holds it in the air like a badge. “Here’s my identification, shithead.”

He stands up, partly to show them his height, and motions toward the bar. “Sorry about the mess there. Little accident. Small tremor. You guys must be on a fault line.”

They stay silent, stare at him, expressionless.

“I’ve got to guess that you were out dancing up a storm. Huh? Am I right? I just want to ask you, you know, before we get the party started here, what’s the story with the dancing anyway? I mean, size-wise and all, is it harder or easier? I’ve got no idea. Being so low to the ground and all. Is it easier? Is that how you score all the gold? Or do you pull a lot of sympathy votes? Pity the dwarfs, you know?”

“Are you from the police department?” Wallace asks, desperate to sound calm. “Do you have a name?”

“Son,” Speer says, even though Wallace has two decades on him, “we haven’t started the question-and-answer part of the evening yet. And when we do, you’ll be in the answer section. Right now, we’re still getting acquainted. So, could you do me a favor and turn on that beauty over there. The Philco G25-P. Nineteen forty-one, right? Gorgeous machine, there. Hope you’ve got that baby insured.”

Wallace hesitates, then moves to the radio and turns it on. “April in Paris” begins to play. Speer closes his eyes, lets a big boyish grin break on his face, and starts to sway a bit, hands out in front of him like he was ready to climb an invisible ladder.

“What a song. What a wonderful piece of music. Melodious, you know. Not like the crap today. And I’m speaking as a relatively young man. I see a common denominator in today’s music. Not the preprogrammed electronics. Not the Satanic lyrics. Nope. Lack of melody. Bottom line is a pervasive lack of melody. Drives me crazy.”

He opens his eyes, stops swaying. “Getting back to dancing. I’m genuinely curious. You’ve got such small extremities. Is this a hindrance or a help?”

He pauses, staring at them, smile gone.

“I suppose,” he says, nodding to himself, “it really depends on who your partner is. By that I mean — fellow dwarf or not. Do you two dance exclusively with one another? You ever tried it with a normal-sized person?”

He moves away from the couch and next to Olga. Wallace remains next to the radio.

He puts an arm around Olga’s shoulder, gestures toward her with his head, says to Wallace, in this mock whisper, “Hey, little guy, you mind if I give her a whirl here? Just take a second.”

Wallace’s heart starts to pump. He looks around the room, says, “Look, we both know why you’re here—”

Speer cuts him off. “Thanks, pal. Return the favor someday.”

He scoops Olga up with one arm, turns her until she’s facing him, maneuvers her into an awkward waltz stance, an arm around her waist, hand in hand, out to the side a bit. Her shoes dangle two feet above the floor.

“Ooh, you’re heftier than you look, dear. Now relax and I’ll lead.”

He starts a strange semiwaltz toward the center of the room, turns it into a sloppy tango, humming music that doesn’t match what the radio plays.

“Please put her down,” Wallace says, helpless, fading toward a whine, frantic for a plan, a course of action.

Speer ignores him and says, “This is really wonderful. Really different. I like this. You tell me if I’m squeezing too tight. Wouldn’t want to snap the spine. You know, I’m not sure I could go back to a full-sized partner now. You’ve spoiled me, Olga.”

Her eyes are closed. She’s fighting both tears and a rage that tells her from where she’s hanging she could get off a perfect pointed-toe into his groin, bring him right to the ground. She hopes that Wallace would be ready to act, to grab a golf club and cave in his skull, shatter the bridge of his nose, break a kneecap. But she can’t help knowing the guy’s a cop. And everything she’s feared since the day she married Wallace has suddenly come true. Finally, tonight, in the safety of their rec room, every bad daydream has been made flesh.

He brings his mouth close to her ear like they were at some eternal high school prom. She anticipates the moistness before it actually comes. And then it comes. His tongue dips in toward her eustachian tube, a quick lick and then a whisper, “What do you say you and I ditch this guy and head out to my car?”

The tears win out and start to stream.

“You want money?” Wallace yells. “I got money. You want to bring me in, then let’s go.”

Speer stops dancing, releases Olga, and she falls to the floor like a heavy, lifeless doll. A look grows on Speer’s face, an annoyed, rigid-lipped squint.

“Change partners,” he says, steps over to Wallace and picks him up in a rougher grip. They start to do something resembling a samba and Speer asks, “This a rented tux?”

Wallace can’t answer. Olga stays on the ground, pulls herself into a corner, and weeps.

“Now, Mr. Browning,” Speer says, dipping, “there are a lot of ways we can do this. And not all of them have to involve losing the deposit on this tux. Not all of them have to involve me taking pretty Olga away with me. Now, I don’t want to bust you. I’d be a goddamn laughingstock bringing in munchkins-gone-bad, you know? And I don’t want your fucking money. I’ll tell you, that was insulting. That was not a wise thing to say. I always picture you people as being more polite or something. I don’t know why.”

He does a sudden, off-balance spin, then lifts Wallace and places him on the fireplace mantel.

“What I want is for the three of us to have a long conversation about your private little broadcast booth behind the fireplace there. And I want some names—”

“We’ll tell you,” Olga yells. “Whatever you want.”

Wallace gives her a confused, maybe pained, look, and Olga’s fear bolts into a surge of anger. She screams, “Don’t you dare look at me like that.”

Wallace puts his hands up over his ears and bites in on his bottom lip. He looks like an oversized pop-art statue, a roadside souvenir that somehow went horribly wrong during the creation process.

Speer’s got them both, turned them against one another. It took less time than he anticipated and he’s more than a little proud of this. He lets his pleasure show by easing the act a bit, smiling, holding up his hands in a joint stop sign to both husband and wife.

“Kids, kids, kids,” he says, “we don’t have to be this way. There’s no need for this behavior. That’s what I’ve been trying to make clear to you all along. I just need a little cooperation. Now, what do you say?”

He saunters to the fireplace, lifts Wallace, and deposits him on the floor.

“Mr. B, you’re an old pro in this department. I took a little tour of your studio there behind the fireplace. Little cramped. From my perspective anyway. But there’s enough evidence behind that wall to take this life away. Take old DeForest Road away. You’ve been here over twenty years. Mortgage is almost paid off, right? We can take away the house, the job, the savings. You’re a CPA, right? Upstanding member of the community and all, right? You’re on committees. You’ve got friends. This little—” he pretends he’s reaching for a correct word—“hobby of yours would surprise them all quite a bit, don’t you think?”

He steps back, offers Olga a hand up without looking at her. She accepts it and gets to her feet.

“Let’s calm down here a second. Let’s catch our breath. Sit down on the couch there, the two of you. Next to each other.”

They comply and he begins a slow pace in front of them, an act he hopes shows just a hint of patience, reasonableness. He stops now and then at the fireplace mantel, leans against it, strikes the pose of a 1950s TV dad, a young Robert Young, a slightly hipper Hugh Beaumont. He gives the tone that he’s rehearsed in the runny mirror of his basement apartment for over a month:

“Okay. I think the three of us need to accept certain givens. Things are not the same right now as they were yesterday. Yesterday your lives had not yet changed. Wallace, you were working on some small company’s tax problems. Olga, you were baking a bundt cake, clearing up last-minute details with Magda down at the Baron. Am I right? Have I done my homework? Okay, overnight things change. That is the nature of life. We don’t like it. As creatures, as animals, we don’t like change. Particularly this type of change. Nightmarish change. And your nightmare has a name. Its name is Agent Speer. I’m your nightmare. I’m sorry, but that’s how it’s worked out. The currents of fate brought us together. Nothing either of us can do about that.”

“Now, Wallace. You have a problem. You’re not alone in this. Thousands of Americans across the country have the same affliction. I view it as a disease, though I really don’t know if, at this point, the AMA would back me up. But I’ve spent some time studying the phenomenon. I’m not some novice jumping into the fray at the last minute. My knowledge has evolved. You people show the same symptoms as an addict, as an abuser. You’re compulsive. Lousy cure percentage, even with help. Help that you don’t want. No matter what the cost to family and friends around you. I don’t know if Mr. Phil Donahue has ever done one of his shows on your affliction, but he ought to. It’d be a genuine public service. To my mind anyway.”

“Right now, you’re saying, ‘What’s the big deal? What have I done that’s so wrong?’ And I want you to know that I understand that type of thought. You’ve been honing it, refining it for so long it’s got a thick sheen over it. But, Wallace, the truth is the truth. At some point, you have to climb up on the step stool and look in the mirror and admit to yourself. You have to look in the mirror, into you own eyes, no one else’s, and say, ‘God save me, I’m a jammer.’

“There. I said the J-word.” As you’re both well aware, there are very specific laws in this country regarding the transmission and content of radio signals. There are licensing requirements and financial obligations. Papers to be filed. Inspections. Legal documentation. Bonds. The Federal Communications Commission oversees this entire enterprise. It’s an enormous responsibility. There’s so much to be considered.

The air around us is bursting with radio waves. There’s only one way to prevent absolute chaos. And that’s to rely on mutually agreed-upon laws and regulations, standards and practices. There’s a complex system that’s been in existence for a long, long time. It’s grown as culture and technology have changed. The system has evolved with the times.

“Mr. and Mrs. B, I think you’d agree with me that in any system there are bugs. There are inherent, annoying snags. I think bugs is the perfect word. Perfectly descriptive. Maybe it’s part of the nature of things. God’s design, a wrench in the works just to keep us on our toes, keep us from stagnating. Or maybe it’s so we can appreciate normalcy when we manage to glimpse it. I don’t know. I know, very simply, that I’ve been given a job to do. My job is your nightmare. I am an officer of the federal government. I’m a federal cop. My jurisdiction is coast-to-coast. My specialty is search and destroy. Search and destroy bugs in the system of public communications. I’m an exterminator. And you, Wallace, and you, Olga, you are the cockroaches.”

He goes for the long pause, lets the weight of his words settle down on top of them, push them a little deeper into the couch.

“Specifically,” Wallace says, voice on the edge of cracking, “what is it you want from me?”

“Specifically,” Speer says, almost a mimic, but not quite, “I want you to assist me in any and all ways necessary to bring my investigation to an efficient conclusion.”

“You want me to be an informer,” Wallace says.

“I dislike the connotation of the word.”

“You want me to supply you with a list of my associates.”

“Fellow jammers, yeah. That would be a start. I’ll also want their addresses, occupations, where they spend their time, where they purchase their equipment. That sort of thing.”

“And if I don’t assist you?”

Speer pulls in some air, blows it out, shrugs. He takes a handkerchief from a back pocket and blows his nose, refolds the rag, and repockets it.

“Excuse me. Pollen count is murder today.”

“You’ll ruin us,” Olga puts in. “You’ll arrest us, humiliate us. You’ll supply the stations with any information they need for a lawsuit.”

Speer stares down at his wing tips, gives a sheepish grin and a hesitant nod. He says, “Look, you’re bright people. You’ve both been around the block a few times. You don’t need me to explain to you how this life works. You’ve got an above-average imagination. You can envision the consequences. Do you really need me to make a list for you?”

He waits just a second and then, “Of course not. Game’s over. The good guys have won. Say to yourselves, ‘It was fun while it lasted.’ Then do what’s necessary. Protect your way of life, for God’s sake. Look, Wallace, you’re the patriarch, as far as I can see. My files say you’ve been at this since the beginning, early fifties, am I right? These younger jammers, they look up to you. I’ll bet you’re practically a legend in this town, in your little cult. A figure of respect among these people, am I right?

“You’ve seen the whole parade, okay? You started out a young man, solo, maybe even before you met Olga. You started small-time — prank stuff. Maybe you vandalized a small transmitter with a baseball bat. Maybe you knocked out power in the basement of a station building. But the years went by and things got more and more complicated. Technology took the express train, right? And you kept up. You did the work. You kept pace, got to know the new equipment as it came along. Then you start actually broad-casting yourself. Ham. C.B. You get more refined. You get a reputation. You’re knocking the official stuff off the air more and more often. And you even pick up an M.O. — you’re the sound-effects guy. That’s your label, your tag. You knock their signals down with a Spike Jones routine, shotgun bangs, raspberries, Chinese gongs. The younger people love it. Becomes a cult kind of thing. More kids get involved, they seek you out somehow, there’s a network evolving, a way for you to stay safe but branch out, form a little rebel community. And the beauty is, and this is always the beauty, right? The beauty is it’s all done in deep cover. On the surface, all of you guys carry on quote, normal, unquote, lives, right? Anyone can be a secret jammer. Your milkman, your kid’s kindergarten teacher, the candy store owner. Like the gays way back. Like the drug people sometimes. The communists after World War II. It’s a Jekyll-Hyde kind of thing. And that’s what makes it exciting. Am I right?”

Wallace just stares at him.

Speer holds his hands out palms-up.

“Now, I’m not bargain hunting here. I’m ready to be prudent but fair. Basically, as I see it, the more you tell me, the more insulated I can make you. At some point I could even see a way for this to not only secure you from any personal harm but, in fact, profit you to some degree. There’s no reason we can’t all benefit from this relationship. Believe me, no one wants a smooth, quiet ride more than I do.”

Olga and Wallace look at each other. She reaches over and takes his hand in both of hers.

It’s Wallace’s turn to start weeping. His eyes moisten, salt up, start to drip.

Speer takes a cardboard notebook from the breast pocket of his coat. It’s got a spiral wire binding across the top, like a mini dictation pad. He thumb-clicks a long ballpoint and scribbles something. He can’t manage to suppress the smugness that’s spreading on his face.

He moves over, sits down next to Wallace on the couch, and says, “Who knocked QSG off the air tonight?”

But he’s tried to reel his fish just a bit too early. Wallace balls his fists and presses them to his eyes. When he takes them away, desperation has been replaced by outrage. His tongue comes stuttering out of his mouth and licks across his bottom lip, and though his voice has a quaking rhythm, his words are low and clear.

He says, “Up yours, pigboy.”

There’s a classic paralyzed second, then Speer explodes, grabs Wallace by his shirtfront, and yanks him off the couch and onto the floor. He removes a leather blackjack from his jacket pocket, takes a step toward Wallace, stops, blows air out his nose, reaches back without looking, and backhands Olga in the head.

She’s knocked sideways on the couch and Wallace starts to yell. But it’s too late. Speer has turned full-body to face the woman. She’s stunned, sprawled sideways like a small side of pink beef on a cutting table. Speer goes to work with an oldtime bell-ringing motion, right arm pulling downward in alternating cross-arcs. The slap-sound of lead-weighted leather impacting against Olga’s body is horrible: first a high, cracking snap into skin, then a more dulled, unreverberating thud into bone.

All the screams come from Wallace. Olga is hunched into a shocked silence, her face pushed into the cushion. Wallace has crawled to Speer’s feet and latched onto his legs, trying to pull him away. But it’s a futile move. Speer is pumped and ready to do anything. A line of blood has started to flow from Olga’s visible ear.

Speer interrupts the whipping to bring up a leg and stomp at Wallace with his wing tips. He lands two heel blows dead center to the dwarf’s chest, follows them up with a kick that lifts and sails Wallace back to the fireplace.

The dwarf lands on his back, his vision blurring, trying to suck air. And suddenly Speer is above him, holding a limp, unconscious Olga around the waist like a doll.

Speer’s teeth are bared and he spits on Wallace. He’s on the verge of hyperventilating. When his voice comes it’s more a rasp than a scream. He says, “You fuck, look what you’ve done.”

Then he drops Olga to the floor and grabs hold of her dangling arm by the wrist. He stares, unblinking, at Wallace, and begins to turn the arm until a snapping sound fills up the space between the two men. And a random, undersized bone rips loose from its connections and bursts through the skin.

10

For close to a century, the P&C Abattoir was a functioning slaughterhouse run by a French family named Perec. It’s been shut down for well over two decades and there’s probably no one left in the Park who can even remember the last Perec, the small bachelor with the bushy crown of silver hair and the pencil mustache, who was called simply “the Frenchman” and wore the same brown trench coat to work through all the seasons and carried his lunch of an onion and a wedge of cheese in a crumpled white pastry bag.

Now everyone on West Street just calls the two-story brick mill house “the abattoir,” as if this were a generic name for all empty brick arcs, or as if the sound of the word implied something more exotic and maybe sexual, a Latino dream of Gallic brothels, the floors stained forever with perfumes and talc rather than fifty years’ worth of steer blood and the sand of band-sawed bones.

Hannah has her gun out, gripped in her right hand, held down by her thigh. She approaches the building by the rear alley and comes up the fire escape to the second-floor entrance. The old steel door is ajar the way Iguaran promised it would be.

She steps into a loft-office area, a place that once processed paperwork, filled orders for a gross of steaks, a thousand center-cut roasts, ten thousand pounds of ground chuck. The office is empty now except for a large gunmetal desk pushed against a wall and missing all its drawers. There’s a sunfaded, oversized calendar still hanging from an opposite wall, nailed into the bricks with a large rusted spike and announcing, perpetually, that it’s May 1972.

Moving across the loft to a wrought-iron balcony, Hannah looks down to see three figures clustered in a far corner below. The only light is a white beam that fans out to shine on a far wall. Stray wisps of smoke drift through the light. There’s a familiar ticking sound echoing through the brick cavern and it’s a second before Hannah realizes it’s the sound of a movie projector. She pivots and is able to make out the images playing against the bricks — a grainy shot of rats scrambling out of the hold of a ship, first one, then a few, then a swarm, crawling over each other, seemingly frantic. It’s a film she’s seen before, a silent black-and-white classic—Nosferatu. German, she remembers. Around 1922, she thinks. The first adaptation of Dracula.

She moves to the narrow iron stairway and descends into what was once the largest meat processing plant in town. She can recall walking with her father once, just before the abattoir closed. They passed one of the front loading ports just as a delivery truck had pulled away and the huge metal rolldown door was still open. It was late fall and the air held a hard chill. White steam hung around her father’s mouth as he spoke to her, holding her hand, keeping her close. But the talk ceased as they passed the loading door and both took in the scene: a man in a heavy-looking white smock, stained everywhere with rust-colored blotches, a green rubber garden hose held with both hands, a jet of water spurting from the nozzle down onto the concrete floor. The man was hosing away steer blood, and the water from the hose was hot, and as it mixed with the cold November air, gusts of steam flew everywhere, making vision into some hyper-real dream, some trace memory that seemed to be climbing back to the here and now. The concrete floor was sloped slightly, like a movie theater, and there was a round, grate-covered drain set into the lowest point and the blood and water eased into an ongoing whirlpool around the edge of the drain. And beyond the drain, where the flooring rose back to level, there were racks of metal frames fitted with thick steel hooks, huge, mutant fishing hooks out of your most troubling nightmares. And, of course, hanging from these industrial hooks were sides of beef, almost-whole steers, headless and hideless but with legs intact, the run of their powerful bodies completely evident, totally recognizable for what they once were and looking enormous. They hung in a uniform row, like pressed suits in a walk-in closet.

Hannah remembers her father pulling her past the loading door, but not before a burst of nausea exploded through her stomach and something like a mix of fear and pity and guilt and confusion broke on her neck and arms and legs. She remembers her father tried to start talking again, to pick up their conversation as if it had never been interrupted. And Hannah loved him for his effort, but resented him for not realizing its futility, for not accepting that there was no way to steal back the vision she’d just been given. And trying to was something like a loving insult.

She advances toward the three figures. A small table lamp is turned on and things become clearer. She sees a large man sprawled on a ratty, black leather couch. He’s beefy-looking but not fat or flabby, a full face with a conspicuous dark mole angled out below his right nostril and above his bushy Zapata mustache. She’d place him in his mid-forties. Traces of gray filter through his closely cropped dark hair. His eyebrows are still completely black and very thick, his forehead lined with permanent creases. He’s got deep, purplish circles under his eyes that might betray a tendency to insomnia or maybe a vitamin deficiency, but the eyes themselves are stunningly vivid, even in this poor light, completely alive and focused on her. Her first impression is of a patriarchal presence that has somehow solidified before its time. He projects the bearing of a wise grandfather without the number of years to account for it. And he dresses young — a stylish black V-neck sweater, the sleeves pushed up on his arms, and a pair of gray pleated pants with cuffed legs.

There’s a small monkey, like an organ grinder’s monkey, lying prone on the man’s shoulder, asleep and nuzzling near his neck. There’s an old-fashioned black round-topped doctor’s bag on the couch next to him, open, revealing dozens of plastic vials. He’s chewing on the end of a red felt-tip pen. Open in his lap is a newspaper Hannah’s not familiar with—Pacific Rim Journal. Various sections of newsprint are corralled with red circles.

Next to the man is a small, dark woman wearing royal-blue spandex bicycle pants and a leather bra with intricate stitching that looks somewhat like a harness. The outfit shows off an assortment of perfectly toned muscles. Her face is all cheekbones and lips. Hannah thinks the woman could make a fortune as a model, a pouty, postmodern mannequin sneering at a camera lens while seated on the hood of some glitzy sports car. She has a waterfall of black wiry hair that’s been pulled back and tied into a loose ponytail. Her function seems to have something to do with the silver IV pole next to the couch. The pole supports a clear plastic bag that hangs from a small S-shaped hook. The bag is filled with a brownish solution that’s dripping at scheduled intervals into a plastic vein that, in turn, is plugged into the man’s arm.

Sitting behind the couch is the projectionist, a younger, leaner version of the patriarch. He’s hunched on a stool, working with a rag, silently cleaning a sawed-off shotgun that rests next to the movie projector on a rickety wooden worktable. He’s handsome in a threatening, predatory kind of way — huge eyes, brown to the point of blackness, a square jaw, clean-shaven, an alertness to his bearing. His hair looks like it may have once been as wiry as the woman’s, but he seems to have had it straightened, an old-time conk job. There’s a short, fat scar on the side of his neck.

Spray-painted on the wall behind the worktable are huge block letters of neon scarlet that spell out Welcome to the Last Wave. Hannah thinks it’s like a message you’d read entering the fun-house ride at some malign traveling carnival.

The man caps the felt pen, slides it behind his right ear, takes a breath, and says, “Thank you for dropping by, Detective Shaw.”

Hannah gives a formal nod and says, “Thanks for having me, Mr. Iguaran.” She head-motions toward the graffiti and adds, “You’ve got to find yourself a new designer.”

Iguaran makes a slight shrug. “At this moment in the Park’s history, having the ability to process graffiti is handier than having a fax machine. But that will change. Please,” he says, gesturing to the couch, “have a seat.”

Hannah looks at the projectionist and says, “Thanks, but I’ll stand.”

Iguaran nods. “However you feel comfortable. Would you like a drink?”

She gestures to the IV flow. “Thanks, but chemo isn’t on my diet these days.”

“Platelets and washed cells,” Iguaran says with a huge grin as if he’s just shown her snapshots of his children. “From the wombs of newborn lambs. Or is it the uterus? Imported from Switzerland. They breed them on a compound outside of Guarda. Costs me a fortune. And then there are the courier charges. Your FDA can be so provincial.”

“I’m sure.”

“But I must say I’ve never felt better. I’ve got the reflexes of a twenty-year-old. Though I do get chills when I pass by angora.”

Hannah can’t suppress a smile and says, “Well, there are side effects to every cocktail.”

Iguaran takes some air in through a clogged nose and says, “Forgive my rudeness.” He extends a hand to the woman and says, “This is Ursula, my administrative assistant. And this,” turning his head to look at the projectionist, “is my son, Nabo.”

Hannah nods to both of them without saying a word and they respond in kind. There’s some awkward silence, then Hannah makes an exaggerated turn from side to side and says, “So the abattoir is your place now.”

“We passed papers a month ago. Still haven’t completely moved in.”

“I thought you just liked a primitive look.”

Iguaran slaps his leg, too hard. “I was hoping you’d have a sense of humor. You haven’t disappointed me. Wonderful. Very good.” He looks up toward the ceiling and says, “I bought it for the space. Plenty of room to move around here. Very spacious for a starter home—”

“Meaning you’re already planning another move?” Hannah interrupts. “To the Hotel Penumbra, maybe?”

Iguaran juts out his jaw and gives a slow-motion headshake that says no. “You Yankees,” he says, “always so anxious to get straight to business.”

“I’m not a Yankee,” Hannah says, quietly but definitively.

Iguaran shrugs again and mumbles, “Have it your way,” then picks his voice up and continues. “I have no interest in acquiring the Penumbra. For me, it will always hold the spirit of Cortez. A man has to put his own character onto a building. You wait two years, maybe eighteen months. Then come back to the abattoir. It will be the country of Iguaran. Besides, the word is the Loftus boys are looking at the Penumbra.”

Now Hannah shakes her head, “I don’t think so. Where’s the Irish margin? Their population base in the Park is minimal except for the Castlebar Road Boys. And they’re real uneasy about that connection. Old man Loftus is too legitimate to step back into the Park. And the kids are too eccentric. They don’t want the crudities enough. They don’t revel in it. They’re media-heads—”

Iguaran smiles like a smug lawyer or chess player and cuts her off. “I would agree.” He pauses, his mouth still open, clear that there’s more to come, stopping just for effect until it seems like the silence of the huge building will take shape, metamorphose into some jungle monster from the collective imagination of the whole third world, and come at this white woman who holds a badge and a gun. Finally, Iguaran says, “So you see I’m the logical choice to fill the vacuum.”

This is what Hannah expected but still feared to hear. She says, “Uncle Chak would disagree with that conclusion.”

“Please,” Iguaran says, mock-offended, “let’s not turn this conversation into a farce. The Cambodian is totally regressive. Chak is a tribal mentality in a global net. He’s encouraging his men to speak Khmer, for God’s sake. Tell me something, Detective. If Dr. Cheng himself were forced to choose between me and Chak, racial allegiances standing, who do you think he’d pick?”

Hannah lifts her eyebrows, adamant. “I think the point is, Iguaran, Dr. Cheng is still very much in the picture.”

“If you truly believe that, you’re not fit to walk Lenore’s streets, are you?”

Hannah hesitates at the mention of the name, then comes back with, “They’re not Lenore’s streets anymore, are they?”

Iguaran slaps his thigh again as if he’s scored a point. “Exactly, Detective Shaw. My point exactly. They’re open streets at the moment. The Park is wide open. There’s a window right now. A time frame when moves can be made, the system retooled. Cortez was one player in a vast and constantly evolving machine. He had his skills, a very distinct style, but in crucial ways he was ill equipped.”

“My reading,” Hannah interrupts, “is that Cortez left the Park of his own volition.”

Iguaran waves a hand, concedes the point. “Whatever. He is gone. I am here—”

“Along with Dr. Cheng and Uncle Chak and Sylvain the Haitian and Peker the Turk and—”

Iguaran comes forward on the couch, clearly annoyed. “But I know the market. I understand the mind of the customer. The product, the service, they’re immaterial. The customer wants the bells and the whistles to be continually louder and longer-lasting. And he wants delivery now. Always now. Immediately is not soon enough. I understand distribution, division of territories, the commission incentive. I understand management. The fragility of the carrot and the stick. When to prune and weed and when to overlook the marbling of fat. I understand the nuances of postindustrial commerce, Detective. I understand the polysystem itself. Do you know why, Detective?”

“I think I’m about to be told.”

Iguaran settles back down and starts to tap lightly at the plastic tubing running into his arm. “Because I know, to the core of my brain I know, that there is an animal in the human heart. In every single throbbing heart on this planet, there is a perpetually hungry creature that’s motivated by the most primal of instincts. And that beast, Detective, is never satiated.”

There’s a second of silence and then Hannah says, “You’re a real visionary, Iggy.”

Iguaran crosses his legs. “The coming months will show you the truth.”

“I’m always looking to be educated.”

Hannah can tell he’s not completely sure how to play her. He wants an ally, but he needs a certain level of respect at this crucial stage. He’s calculating how much to push and how much to take. He’s instinctive, like Cortez and like Dr. Cheng. Like all the neighborhood mayors. But he’s also rabidly ambitious. If Cortez didn’t want to rule the Park enough, it’s possible Iguaran wants it too much.

He runs a tongue around his lips, then says, “You mock me, Detective Shaw. But we’re already hooking into our resources. We’re tying into monetary funds and banking networks that transcend ideas of history. Of ideology. There is no more good versus evil, Detective. There is only the connected versus the unconnected. And this is why I’ll never understand you or your predecessor. You jokingly call me a visionary. But you appear to be a blind woman. You are a mystery, Detective. You are intelligent. You are strong. You appear to be realistic. Why do you willfully choose to remain on the losing side? It simply makes no sense.”

Hannah approaches and sits down next to Iguaran on the couch, clearly annoying Ursula, who glares and tugs down on the hem of the leather bra.

“I’m kind of a genetic mutant,” Hannah says. “Just one of those freaks that screw up all the stats.”

Iguaran gives a small laugh that echoes lightly, then he turns his attention to the movie as if some alarm has sounded and ended their meeting.

“But I’m not really the issue here, am I?” Hannah says, and stops for a long pause to show her change of tone and attitude. The introductions are over and it’s time to get down to some understanding. “Let’s assume I’ve looked over the recent events in Bangkok and let’s assume that basically, you and I concur on most of the major conclusions. Cortez is not coming home. Dr. Cheng does not have the leash on his people the way he once did. The Irish and the Jews and the Italians have gentrified themselves so they’ve all got at least one foot in the mainstream. And the rest, the newcomers, the Jamaicans and the Haitians and the Turks and the rest — they don’t yet have the numbers or the experience or the organization.”

Iguaran continues to stare out at the movie, but he says, “I’m listening.”

“Look, Iguaran,” she says, “both you and I know things are about to happen. There was a balance for a long time down here. You people ran Latino Town and Cheng ran Little Asia and Reverend James took the Projects and everything north. Little pockets of upstarts came and went but the disputes were always worked out before business could be damaged. Okay, fine. But now it’s gone. The old order is running down. Contrary to what you might think, I’m not blind. And I think you and I are both looking for a new balance. I’m saying the two of us have some mutual goals.”

Finally, he looks back at her and in a bland voice says, “You’re saying we’re both pragmatists …”

She stares at his eyes. “And I’m saying we both know there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Iguaran gives away a smile and glances over his shoulder at Nabo, as if he wants his son to pay close attention to a lesson in progress. He says, “Very true. That’s the only belief allowed in this part of town. We’re both devotees of the barter system.”

“I’m looking for some information.”

Iguaran waits a long beat, then begins to nod his head slightly and in a much lower voice says, “The priest’s murder.”

“What do you know?”

“I know my people had nothing to do with it. I hope we can agree on this point. We had no quarrel with Father Todorov. We’re Catholics, for God’s sake. And even if, for some hidden reason, we did have a grudge against the priest, now wouldn’t be the time for a move. Would it, Detective?”

Hannah sighs and turns to look at the movie. After a minute she turns back and says, “I don’t think the Popes did it. But I think it’s possible they could find out who did. If you asked them to.”

Now Iguaran fights a smile. “We may be able to ask around. Look for any new faces. Check into any deviant behavior …”

He lets his words drift off and Hannah says, “I’m prepared to offer some future concessions.”

“Give me twelve hours, my friend. If there’s anything worth knowing, I’ll have it by then.” He gives an abrupt nod, turns to Ursula, and snaps, “Quito la aguja.”

And it’s clear to Hannah that their meeting has adjourned. She turns awkwardly and heads for the stairs, glancing at Nosferatu as she walks. A young man in period dress is reading from an oversized book. Hannah knows the book is the log of the captain of the Demeter, the ship that brings Dracula to England. The captain’s entry flashes up on the bricks:

18 May 1838

Passed Gibraltar — Panic on board

Three men dead already — mate out of his mind

Rats in the hold — I fear the plague

Up in the office loft, she takes one last look down at Iguaran. It’s as if she’s waiting for a feeling to hit her, something comforting but without a name, some corollary to instinct that could assure her that a year down the road she’ll have formed a delicate accommodation with this Colombian patriarch, a well-tuned give-and-take that would allow them both not only crucial information but also a margin of ease where they could share loose counsel.

The desire bothers her because it feels like a betrayal of Dr. Cheng. Because it’s a coded way of acknowledging or even affirming the thought that maybe Cheng won’t be around in six months. And that maybe it’s time to start forming new relationships.

She watches as Ursula removes the IV needle from Iguaran’s arm and applies a round, flesh-colored Band-Aid to the wound. She tries to study Iguaran’s face as he gestures for his son to approach and then starts whispering in the young man’s ear. She doesn’t feel any kind of connection. Not even the vague stirrings of chemistry that could result in a future connection, a moment when she could caution him that the best evolutions are always the slowest, the ones that subtly give the organism plenty of time to assimilate in its new form, to get comfortable and natural enough within its new self to pay full attention to its environment.

She’d like to envision a coming era when she could inject this kind of warning. But right now, all she feels is the certainty that it’s just not her job.

11

As you cross through the intersection of Voegelin Street and Watson Street and unofficially enter into the outer perimeter of Bangkok Park, you pass under the shadow of a huge, abandoned billboard mounted long ago atop the old Habermas factory. Over the course of the past decade, the advertisement for fire safety has faded and chipped into a dull, sun-bleached rectangle of white. Now none of the original picture or words remain. In their place, on the white background, an anonymous artist has painted, in a Day-Glo shade of green, a detailed rendering of an apelike creature. It’s a fierce animal and there’s an unnatural intelligence in its face, along with a humanlike expression of rage. Underneath the beast is a foreign inscription that the locals know is written in Khmer. In smaller letters beneath this, in English, is printed a rough translation: Hyenas Rule.

Hazel glances briefly up at the billboard, catches herself, lowers her eyes back to the sidewalk, and picks up her pace. She’s wearing a pair of black stretch jeans and a blue sleeveless T-shirt with the words You’re Guilty stenciled in black across the front. She’s getting a lot of looks from all the drunks as she walks by their stoops. Eddie had wanted to come with her, but she refused. It would have been nice to have brought in two sets of eyes and Eddie’s biceps and attitude, but she couldn’t let him think she needed an escort into what she hopes will be their new home. It was bad enough that Eddie had to make the connection for her.

He plays nine ball every now and then at a dump on the Canal-Bangkok border, a place called the Play Penh Social Club. It’s one of the few halls that still keep a room in the back strictly for billiards. And as Eddie has said to her more than once, “You know how much those jarheads go for billiards.” After the Play Penh closed up one night, Eddie paid twenty bucks to a guy named Tho for a five-minute conversation. It was clear from Tho’s lack of colors or tattoos that he wasn’t a Hyena, but he had a cousin who was a. lieutenant to Loke, the Hyenas’ current CEO. For another twenty, Tho promised to set something up.

So now Hazel’s headed for a tiny brick storefront with a hand-painted sign nailed over the entrance that reads The Angkor Arcade. She glances at her watch to make sure she’s on time and knocks on the dented steel door twice with hard flat-palmed raps. A full minute goes by, then the door is opened by a skinny Oriental kid wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of filthy white dishwasher’s pants. He’s got long, silky bangs that fall in a rigid line just barely above his eyes. He stands in the doorway, expressionless, looking her over. There’s no muscle on him and Hazel would bet she could take him down to the floor with a fast knee and a boot to the ankle, but she’s the intruder here and no matter how rude things get, no matter how much attitude gets thrown at her, she’s got to stay quiet and respectful. Maybe more than anywhere else, in Bangkok Park beggars cannot be choosers.

“I’m here to see Loke,” she finally says to the skinny kid. “I’ve got an appointment.”

His eyes are locked on her breasts and she lets it go and waits and after a minute, without looking up to her face, the kid says, “Get inside.”

It’s dark in the clubhouse and she blinks a few times to help her vision adjust. The place is smaller than she’d expected. Years ago it was a neighborhood spa and there’s still a small marble lunch counter at the rear of the room with built-in silver soda-water dispensers. Hazel keeps her head steady but lets her eyes move in a circle. Things become clearer.

There’s a small billiards table in the center of the room with a trio of hooded green lamps suspended over it. Mounted on the right wall is a series of cue holders filled with a display of unmatched sticks. There’s an old Asteroids video game in a corner with its power cord unplugged and dangling before the black screen. Running along the left wall are three Naugahyde booths and scarred wooden tables. A single Hyena sits in each booth, slouched sideways, back against the wall, legs propped up on the seat. They’re dressed in their standard gear — black stretch muscle shirts, white cotton gi pants, and sandals that look like they’re made of hemp. And they’re nothing like the doorman. They’re all pumped up, definitions of upper-body strength. Their hair is cropped close to their scalps. Hazel would judge them to be eighteen or nineteen years old. One of them has a set of nun-chucks draped around his neck like a fighter’s towel.

They stare at her without saying a word and she tries to keep herself from acknowledging that she could be in some serious trouble. But this is the price she needs to pay and there’s always danger in moving to a new world.

Behind the lunch counter, a set of swinging double doors suddenly opens and a tall Hyena steps through and stands with his hands on his hips. He barks a command in Khmer at the doorman, and the kid jumps into action, moving behind Hazel and putting his hands on her shoulders. She starts to flinch and then realizes he means to frisk her, so she makes herself stand rigid as hands run over her body, pausing way too long on her ass and breasts.

After rifling her pockets, the doorman steps away from her and nods. The Hyena behind the counter motions for her to walk toward him. She moves slowly, trying not to betray the growing suspicion that this meeting probably won’t get her much beyond robbed and humiliated.

She steps behind the lunch counter and the Hyena points to the swinging doors. She ends up in a small paneled corridor with a single door halfway down. She looks for a rear entrance, but doesn’t see one, so she steps up to the door and knocks.

A voice from within yells, “It’s open.”

Inside, behind a teak platform desk, sits Loke, the head of the Angkor Hyenas. He’s tilted back in a deep green leather swivel chair that’s trimmed with nailheads. On the desk is a white cordless phone, a foreign newspaper, and a blank yellow legal pad.

Loke’s head is tilted slightly to the side and he has his hands clasped together and resting on his stomach. He’s wearing a variation on the Hyena colors. He’s got on the sandals and gi pants, but his torso is covered with a white cotton V-neck sweater that bears a small Yale University insignia.

He looks older than the ones outside, maybe in his early twenties. His hair is longer than his soldiers’ and he’s got it slicked straight back with styling gel. On the back of his right hand, Hazel spots a tattoo of the same Hyena from the Habermas factory billboard.

“Have a seat,” he says in a low and friendly voice, and he indicates two matching, low-slung black leather chairs positioned before his desk.

Hazel sinks into one and glances around. Loke’s office is much brighter than the outer clubhouse. The decor shocks her. The place has a clean and ordered feel to it. Three walls are painted white and the fourth is lined with black metal utility cabinets all padlocked closed. On the wall behind Loke are two matted and framed maps — one of Quinsigamond and the other of Cambodia. Between them is a framed calligraphied quotation that reads:

Preserve Them — No Profit

Eliminate Them — No Loss

We will burn the old grass

and the new will grow

“Shall I call you Hazel?” Loke asks, sitting up, smiling.

Hazel nods. “Everyone does.”

“Would you like a drink, Hazel? Glass of wine?”

She shakes her head. His voice is clear and almost unaccented. His diction is crisp, maybe a little overprecise.

Hazel knows she should state her case simply and quietly, accept the verdict, and get out. But something about Loke’s manner tempts her to improvise.

“You’re not what I expected,” she says.

He lets a smile break and says, “For a warlord,” giving the phrase a mock seriousness.

“Do you really use words like that?”

He shrugs. “Only in the old pulps,” he says, and gestures over his shoulder with a thumb. Behind him is a small teak bookcase that matches the desk. Hazel leans to the side and sees a line of slim paperbacks with gaudy-colored spines and titles running down them like Teen-Age Mafia and The Black Leather Barbarians.

“I’ve got all the classics. Rumble. The Royal Vultures. The Amboy Dukes.”

On the shelf below the paperbacks is what looks like a small set of encyclopedias or identically bound textbooks. In gold leaf down the spines is the title The Tuol Sleng Manual.

“The first thing you’re going to need to know,” Loke says, “if we can work out”—he pauses, looks up at the ceiling—“an arrangement, is that most of your ideas about the various organizations here in Bangkok are wrong.”

Hazel nods and says, “My people and I are all ready to learn.”

Loke leans back in the chair again.

“How many people are there?”

“About a dozen.”

Loke shakes his head. “I’m going to need an exact figure.”

Hazel nods. “I can give you individual names and addresses. Backgrounds. Whatever.”

“And everyone wants to emigrate?”

“It’s unanimous.”

There are a few seconds of silence. Loke picks up a fat Mont Blanc pen that sits on the legal pad and scratches a few notes. Then he puts the pen back down and says, “Once you come over the border, you don’t go back.”

“I know that,” Hazel says.

“I need to say it anyway. I need to go through the motions here. I need to give the speech.”

He takes a breath and continues, suddenly seeming a bit annoyed. “The Canal Zone is not Bangkok Park. It never will be. You want to emigrate, fine. We’ll discuss terms. But know that the mortality rate here is higher than in Haiti. And know that when players change that fast, there’s little stability. Your status and your loyalties can be altered in an instant. And your time is taken up with things a good deal more serious than fucking up radio stations—”

She cuts him off, points to his sweater, and says, “Did you actually go to Yale?”

He stares at her with an absolutely blank expression and she thinks he’s about to whistle for his lieutenant, but instead he smiles and says, “Jesus, haven’t you got some balls.” He picks up the pen again and says, “I did three years. Never took a diploma. Annoyed the shit out of the family. They took me in the business. But the boss says I’ve got to pay some dues in middle management before I can eat at the grown-ups’ table, so …” He trails off and extends a hand palm-up as if his surroundings explained the rest.

“The boss,” Hazel says, “would be your father?”

Loke shakes his head. “My Uncle Chak. Mother’s brother. Owns the Plain Jar Cafe. He’s the bank for our people. He’s trying to buy up the Goulden Ave block. He hands out housing, jobs. Got a half brother back in Phnom Penh. You can imagine.”

Hazel leans forward over her knees. “You think it’s a good idea to tell strangers your genealogy?”

Loke gives the now-familiar smile. “We’ve done the research, Hazel. You’re not exactly informer material. And you know that if we even see you with the wrong people you’ll be gang-fucked, set on fire, and served as the lunch special down the Plain Jar.”

He says this as if he were relaying the score of a boring ball game.

Loke goes on. “We’ve got over sixty full-member Hyenas. Mainly we’re errand boys and supplemental muscle for Uncle Chak’s company. Though I’d never say that to any of my boys. We handle all the merchant payments down Voegelin and Grassman. We do security for the O dens and whorehouses in our cut of the Park. We move some smack around Goulden. But mainly we’re linemen. We watch the border for the Popes.”

“The Colombians,” Hazel says.

Loke nods. “Scumbags. Which brings us to the question—”

“Why did I come to you instead of them?”

“So why?”

“If you’ve checked, you know I’m pretty well plugged in down the Zone. I’ve got all these little tech-hoods jumping through hoops for me. They’re into the Registry of Deeds mainframe on a regular basis. Since Cortez vanished, the Colombians are scrambling. There’s no one holding it together. Rayuela Realty Trust is going Chapter 11 any day. Didn’t take a genius to know that if you wanted to emigrate, Uncle Chak was the man to see.”

“You think you can afford the”—again he pauses—“licensing fees?”

“Tell me what you need.”

Loke bites on his lip and seems to drift into thought. He pushes the sleeves of his sweater up on his arms and slowly gets out of his chair. He walks around the desk and comes to a stop behind Hazel.

When his voice comes, it’s lower.

“There’s the entrance fee itself. It’s based on a per-person setup.” He places a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see what I can do about a discount in this case.”

She tries not to let him feel her muscles tighten under his palm.

“You’ll have to clear whatever franchises you want to work through me. We’ll want forty percent of your gross the first twelve months. We’ll renegotiate after that. You’ll have some start-up costs at first and we’re not out to make you starve.”

He starts to rub at her neck lightly.

“What else?” she asks, keeping an even voice.

He slides a hand inside her T-shirt, takes hold of her right breast, runs his thumb over her nipple. She lets out a heavy breath but stays quiet.

“All organizations,” Loke says, his own breath audible, “have some initiation rites.”

He pushes himself up against the back of her chair, starts to run his free hand through her hair.

“Rites,” Hazel repeats.

“We’re going to have to see a demonstration of some sort,” he says. “Show us you mean business. Show us some skills.”

“It’s taken care of,” Hazel says. “We’ve already picked someplace to hit.”

“Then there’s only one more piece of business,” Loke says, taking his hand from her hair and grabbing the back of her T-shirt, pulling her out of the chair and down onto the floor. She rolls onto her back and he gets on his knees, straddling her at her waist.

“You have any problems taking a Hyena?” he says, starting to pull off his Yale sweater.

Hazel shakes her head.

“Very good,” Loke says. “You’re going to love this neighborhood.”

12

Speer’s apartment is at the southern end of Bangkok Park, down off Brinkley Boulevard, a one-room studio in the basement of a five-story red brick monster built in the early twenties. Because of the building’s location and the position of the apartment’s two tiny rectangular windows, very little sunlight ever makes it inside. Speer thinks it would be the perfect place to raise mushrooms.

He pays two fifty a month to the super, who everyone calls Corny, an Armenian guy of indeterminate age who wears a purple eye patch and never speaks except to say gaddahm welfare state. The rent does not include heat, but the apartment gets the benefit of the two enormous cast-iron furnaces on the other side of the interior wall. Once or twice a week, always in the middle of the night, one of the furnaces will start an awful banging and thrashing, often punctuated with an excruciating series of pauses to deceive the tenants into thinking it’s always about to stop. Speer doesn’t mind the racket anymore. He’s almost ready to admit to himself that he welcomes it as a signal that things haven’t changed, that he’s still where he was when he went to sleep. Usually the banging pulls him out of a nightmare.

The apartment came semifurnished with a single metal-frame bed, an aluminum patio table that Speer uses as a desk, a wicker rocking chair painted kelly green, a five-drawer bureau with cardboard backing, a mini, dorm-style refrigerator, and a gas stove. To this he added a wall mirror that he hung over the bureau, the original Mr. Coffee he and Margie had received as a wedding gift, his collection of bound back issues of Ham Man Digest, and his radio equipment: a Kenwood R-5000 receiver, a Tascam recorder, and a set of Koss Pro 75 headphones.

Two weeks after he moved in, Speer gave Corny fifty dollars to allow a Dymek antenna to be bolted to the chimney up on the roof. He secured the coaxial lead to a drainpipe that ran down the corner of the building, then brought the wire in through the sidewalk-level window. Now, on a good day, he can monitor as far away as Nigeria. But Speer isn’t interested in most of the chat and babble found around the dial. He usually zeros in on a handful of frequencies. He listens for sounds that the hobbyists ignore. He strains to pull in the obscure and unclear.

Right now, for instance, it’s 4 A.M. and he’s sitting on the red Naugahyde seat of a metal stool and delicately turning the tuner knob on his Kenwood. Open flat on the kitchen table is a spiral-bound notebook, a standard 8½ × 11 schoolboy job, college-ruled and a red-line margin down the left side of each page. On the front cover, on the appropriate line, Speer has printed his name in block letters with a black felt-tip pen. On the inside of the front cover, running down in a neat column, is a series of numbers:

Frqcy (KHz)

3060

Spnsh

3090

Sp

4642

Frnch

4770

Grain

10450

Krn

14947

Gr

23120

Gr

Speer wears a starched T-shirt, the pants to one of his suits, and felt moccasins on his feet. From a water glass on the table he takes a pen, a Papermate metal roller fine-point. He picks it up as if it were a knife, maybe a scalpel, as if he could injure himself by mishandling it. He uncaps the pen and places it on the notebook page, reaches up, and turns on the radio. He spins the tuning knob with the side of his index finger, stops at the desired frequency, adjusts volume and squelch, then sits motionless for a moment as a voice enters the room from the speaker. It’s a female voice with a heavy Spanish accent. He finds it impossible to determine the speaker’s age. He tries to prevent his mind from forming a picture of the woman. He wants to concentrate solely on the voice, the words that come to his ears.

Only they’re not words. They’re numbers. In Spanish. She speaks them in a bland, uninterested manner. She keeps a mechanical, absolutely controlled rhythm, the same spacing between breaths, the same tone: “Atención grupo número cuarenta y nueve … 51512 … 12152 … 32085 … 28911 … 11211 … 61208 … Atención grupo número sesenta y dos … 03151 … 08201 … 02611 … 08129 … 22519 …”

Speer closes his eyes for a moment, listens to the numbers, tries to prevent himself from speculating or analyzing. He just wants this Spanish voice to wash over him like a kind of primal music. He wants to put himself into a mood, create an atmosphere.

And when he feels he’s come as close as he’ll get, he uncaps his pen and in a practiced, legible, no-nonsense script he writes:

4 A.M.

Dear Margie,

What is a man to do? I’m no stranger to discipline. I have attempted to be as ordered and precise with my life as is reasonable. I have attempted to be prudent. As you know, my methodology has always been to review all available options and select the most promising. I often said to you, “We can only work with the available facts.” I have steadfastly acknowledged that there will always be certain parcels of information that we aren’t privy to. No matter how much skill or intuition a man possesses, there will be events he can’t alter. I’ve always felt that understanding this was one of the chief signals of maturity. I’ve always felt I had an unalterable grasp of this fact.

Were I acting in a professional manner, applying all I’ve learned to this turn my life has taken, there are questions I would ask. This is how I would begin. I would start with broad, general questions. Later, based on the answers I’d obtained, I’d narrow in. I’d select the most promising avenues. Try to verify evidence. Try to establish patterns and trails. See what led to what. This is sometimes called “tracking” and I like to think of the word in the way an outdoorsman would, in literal terms — following markings to trace the route of your prey.

I think you know, Margie, that if I wanted to, I could track you down. You’re an intelligent woman, and though I was limited in the degree to which I could discuss my work, certainly you’re aware of the tools at my disposal, the networks of information, the breadth of data I can access, the amount of manpower that would be willing to do a favor for a fellow agent. I’m reasonably sure that it would take no more than a week to ten days to locate the city you’re in, who you’re with, where you’re staying, where you’ve been, and on and on. Ad infinitum.

At the moment, for complex reasons of my own, I’ve chosen not to take this route. Ultimately, I’m not sure what the benefit would be to either of us. As adults, we each make choices, take actions, accept the consequences. Thinking about this last week, I realized that my goal in seeking you out, my true goal, would be simply to explain my feelings, to talk to you. Right now, at this moment, I can see where you’d find tremendous irony in this. Perhaps that’s typical in the reality of any marriage. But if what I want to do is enumerate my feelings, convey to you what’s happened to me since your departure, I can do that here, in the safety of this room. Someday these words may get to you. By conventional means or other.

This is a journal of my heart, Margie. Please don’t laugh so bitterly. I’m aware how trite this sounds, how trite it looks to me now, in ink, on the page. But I won’t cross it out. I won’t begin again. Because that would imply an attempt to alter the past, to change history. And we both know what a childish, futile wish that is. We can only chart what is to come (and some would even argue against this).

If you know me, then you know I align myself on the side of free will rather than fate, that we have the definitive say in how our future lives will go.

You should know that I have stopped using amphetamines. Two days after you left, I took all the vials and poured them into the toilet, got on my knees, and pulled the lever. I will admit to you that I experienced a somewhat painful withdrawal for forty-eight hours. But I’ve purified myself with an ongoing regime of weak tea and club soda. (I’ve also been taking extended steam baths at the Y.)

I have also purchased a few paperbacks concerning spousal abuse and its treatment. I recall the incident last spring when I discovered a book of this type in your drawer, but, again, this is the unalterable past. I’ve read over a hundred pages in Dr. H. L. Helms’s Dark Glasses and Rouge.

Possibly these signs of change mean little or nothing to you, Margie. Perhaps you believe there is no hope for me and that everything was entirely my fault. I will concede this.

But, for your part, what you must do, what any notion of justice would insist that you do, is acknowledge, right now, wherever you are, in whatever miserable second-rate motel room or trailer park, that you’ve broken my heart. The triteness of that phrase only makes the pain greater, larger, and more relentless. I am a changed man, Margie. You would see this if you came back. I can control the behavior that terrified you. 1 can eliminate the drug usage. I can participate in an open, rational exchange of ideas.

Alter my future, Margie. I’m waiting.

Send me a message.

13

Ronnie steps inside the apartment, turns off the alarm, and begins to undress in the dark. She has that strange tired but excited sensation, kind of a sweet fatigue, like when she drinks too-potent cappuccino on top of too-cheap mescal, that slow but giddy war within the nervous system that makes her almost stupid the entire next day.

It’s not that she’d take back the airport dance with Flynn. She’s glad it happened and she hopes it happens again. But she has screwed with her normal postshow routine and that always leaves her a little concerned, as if she’s messing with a system that’s taken years to fine-tune and once broken, might never heal.

So, though she’s only got an hour till dawn, she wants to squeeze in at least some of the ritual. She dumps her clothes in the bathroom hamper, takes her short kimono from the hook on the back of the door, and slides it on. She goes to the sink and throws some cold water on her face, dries off, and jogs into the kitchen, where she grabs a pint of ice cream from the freezer and a pint of mescal from the liquor cabinet.

Then it’s out to the balcony, seventeen stories above Main Street. The air is really too cold now for the kimono, but it reminds her of the summer, when every night, from two-thirty till dawn, she took her watch over the city, still hard-core, still the cutting-edge night-owl and still-young Voice of Quinsigamond.

Ronnie’s apartment building is the gray-faced, concrete Heptagon that shoots up twenty-one stories at the west end of Main Street. The first three floors were once owned and occupied by Westblitz Savings and Loan, but about a year ago the Feds walked in one Monday morning, seized the books, sent home the staff, and directed a vanload of bulky young men weighed down with elaborate toolbelts to change all the locks and alarms. A week later the Spy reported that the S&L’s president and two senior V.P.’s were thought to be in either Antigua or southern France, that the institution’s assets were frozen pending a lengthy audit and analysis, and that the trust which owned the Heptagon, which housed Westblitz, had filed for bankruptcy protection.

Outside of Westblitz, the trust had managed to rent only three of the luxury apartments that made up the remaining eighteen floors of the building. In a registered letter, the court had informed Ronnie they’d release her from the lease she’d signed when she’d moved in. Her two neighbors took the opportunity to cut their losses and run. But Ronnie saw no reason for another disruptive move, so now she’s the sole occupant of over 350,000 square feet of downtown Quinsigamond real estate. And as such, she’s taken it upon herself to rename the building. She now insists on calling the Heptagon Solitary, after a sleazy women’s-prison movie she saw on cable late one night.

After the last tenant moved out of Solitary, Ronnie took to exploring the building. One morning, as dawn began to break, she found she still couldn’t sleep and decided to head out to a convenience store and buy a newspaper. But she hit the wrong button in the elevator and instead of the doors sliding open to reveal the garage, they parted on the hallway of the fourth floor. And on impulse, Ronnie stepped off and started to walk around. There wasn’t much to see. She tried the door to every apartment, but they were all locked. She got bored, forgot about the newspaper, went back up to seventeen, and took a bath and listened to the radio.

But the next morning, at dawn, she did the same thing, this time exploring the seventh floor and this time finding an open apartment. It was bare and still had an unfinished feel to it. The electrical outlets were missing faceplates and the carpeting was dusted with dozens of those stray fabric strands left after installation. But Ronnie spent a half hour in the apartment, enjoying the feeling that she wasn’t supposed to be there, savoring this imagined danger of being discovered.

The next night, for reasons she refused to analyze, Ronnie brought her sleeping bag down to the seventh floor and napped in the bare unit until 8 A.M.

Since then, she’s discovered another half dozen open doors. She’s slept in each of them at least once. But she’s made a rule that she’ll only play squatter once a week and so far she’s managed to obey herself.

She’s been in the building for over a year, which for Ronnie is a long stay. She rented it over the phone, long-distance, telling the broker her only requirements were “to be up high and have thick walls.” The height requirement was more for radio reception than view, but now, out on the balcony, seventeen floors over the street, she appreciates the perspective. It’s not that she’s treated to some stunning panorama each morning at two-thirty, coming home from the station, shedding her clothes and washing her face, throwing on her favorite white silk kimono and sprawling on the plastic-weave lounge chair she bought mail-order, snacking on “Cappuccino Commotion” Haagen-Dazs or microwave popcorn washed down with mescal and orange juice. It’s that at this height everything down in the street can seem like a distant film, some grainy B-flick thrown up on a weathered drive-in screen, something she could glimpse from a highway and pass on by. From this height, every action down on Main Street is void of the bulk of its sounds and smells, from the visceral impact of a real encounter. Living on the seventeenth floor is like continuing her radio show throughout the context of the rest of her life. The individuals that she watches in that hour after she returns from QSG are like embodied voices of her callers, their faces still hidden, their crises and obsessions and bizarre traumas all reduced to a distant summation. There’s all the qualities of the true confession, from boredom to physical danger, with none of the consequences of real interaction. She sometimes thinks of Main Street, between the hours of three and five, as her own enormous wide-screen TV, the biggest cathode-ray tube in the city. And the ability of her head to pivot on her spine is a deft remote control that allows her to flip from the gay pickup lines that roll in and out of the bus terminal to the homeless scavengers forever sifting through the Dumpsters outside the public library to the twin sisters who alternate tricks behind Kepler and Gleick’s All-Night Billiard Hall.

This downscale voyeurism has turned into something of a ritual over the past six months and Ronnie wonders what she’ll do when winter hits and she’s forced to lock up the sliders that lead to the balcony. The summer was wonderful. She’d finish Libido Liveline at two, then pack all her gear into her worn, faded-green Girl Scout knapsack, kiss Wayne on the forehead, usually leaving bright red lipmarks, and hand over the airwaves to Sonny Botkin’s Pagan Confidential. During the summer months, she kept the top off the Jeep and sometimes she’d jump up on the interstate before heading home, pick up the speed a little, and let the rush of warm wind drum on her body and head. When she felt fully decompressed, she’d head for Main Street and Solitary. She’d pull the Jeep into her empty underground garage and keep her thumb on the red button of her Mace tube while she waited for the express elevator. Then she’d ride up to her floor singing aloud to the Muzak versions of Supremes hits that played on a tape loop every night.

Ronnie doesn’t know where her habit of renaming things comes from. Technically, and as far as the post office is concerned, she lives in apartment 1707. But in the privacy of her own quirky brain, she insists on calling her place apartment 3G, after the classic comic strip that she only vaguely remembers from her childhood. Wasn’t it three gals in the big city, all roommates, all young and cartoon-glamorous and ready for new romance at every turn? All summer, Ronnie got a kick out of pretending her roommates were on lengthy modeling assignments in Europe. The vision of Lu Ann and Margo quarreling with a thin, slightly fascistic fashion photographer against the backdrop of spurting Roman fountains contrasted beautifully with the gritty Quinsigamond land-scape below the balcony. It was like mixing the sweetness of the gourmet ice cream with the saltiness of the microwave popcorn — it shouldn’t have worked, but for Ronnie it did.

Now she settles herself into the chaise lounge, scans the sky for traces of any sunlight, sees none, and is thankful she hasn’t completely blown the ceremony. She looks back over her shoulder into the dark of her apartment and instantly wonders what Flynn would make of her place. Would he be turned off by the lack of any feminine homeyness? Something about him feels a little old-fashioned, just a hint of anachronism about the guy.

Ronnie’s apartment is a spacious two-bedroom, two-bath “luxury” unit with a galley kitchen and a huge living/dining area that opens onto the balcony. It costs most of her salary, but she’s never been very concerned with savings plans or exotic vacations. Her idea of traveling is to make a job change every year or two and relocate to another part of the country, then dig in for a while, shock and build a virgin audience, and when she hits her peak and the national syndication people come sniffing around, pack the bags again and pull out the trade journals and the road atlas.

Vinnie, the QSG station manager, was shocked by her résumé and ratings sheets. “I don’t get it,” he’d said to her in their first interview. “These numbers, you’re a station saver, you’re a radio messiah. You could head to New York or Atlanta, name your price, let the big sales guys rent your voice coast-to-coast.”

Ronnie gave him her most libidinous smile and said, “I’d rather keep a low profile.”

And Vinnie gave his chronic, world-weary sigh and said, “You’ve come to the right station.”

A week later Ronnie signed the lease for 3-G, called a local rental franchise, and furnished the place in a day. Her only aesthetic requirement was neutral colors, neither too masculine nor too feminine. When the moving men left after delivery she had an earth-toned hotel room, all muted angles and practicality. This was exactly what she’d been after, a setting where she could go to sleep each night and dream that she was in an airport Ramada and due to board a flight at the terminal next door.

Her one oddball, nonrented modification was a huge antique bookcase she bought a week after moving in. Her first Sunday in town, she overpaid a Russian émigré down at the refugee flea market in the train lot on Ironhouse Ave. It was an ornate monster, old and battered and painted a flat black, but hand-tooled with a curving, scrolled headpiece and little pointed spires rising at the top. She had to pay again to have it hauled to the apartment, but it was her one concession to personalization — she loaded it with the contents of her steamer trunk.

Ronnie is a tape-head. She considers her condition a benign affliction. She purchases blank cassettes, through the mail and in bulk quantities. Then she scans the band wave and records hundreds of diverse noises, music, talk shows, news reports, station jingles, EBS tests. Before she moves out of a city, she spends a week sorting through her latest collection. She keeps what she judges to be the top ten percent, though she doesn’t have a system for qualitative judgment. It’s more of an instinctual, instantaneous choice. Then she simply throws the rest of the tapes in trash bags and leaves them in a closet of the vacated apartment. Disposable sound-crap, she calls it. She puts the keepers in the steamer trunk and brings them with her to the next job. She thinks of the cassettes as her version of a photo album, a coded record of all her journeys, an audio cipher of all the highway crisscrossing she’s done for a decade now.

Ronnie never tapes her own show and it amuses her a little that she’s already forgotten a couple of her titles. There was Sensual Sessions in Cleveland and The Carnal Response in Santa Fe, but for some reason Toronto is a blur. She can remember how boxy the broadcast booth was and she still has an occasional fantasy about Yves, her engineer that season. But the name of the show itself has escaped her.

Ronnie has already stayed in Quinsigamond longer than any of her other stops. That fact both bothers and consoles her. Back in June, she’d thought that by Christmas she’d give Vinnie her notice and start sorting her tapes. On Labor Day — a muggy, bad-air holiday that found the city looking as if it had evacuated for the nuclear strike of her childhood daydreams — Ronnie shocked herself by deciding, out on the balcony, about 4 A.M., to work on until spring.

She knows she should have been getting the itch by now, the signals that begin warning of an oncoming move. But it hasn’t happened. She’s migratorily “late,” and this should be causing worry and frustration. This time around, something’s different. It could be her age or a change in body chemistry, but this time she’s got an odd, instinctual hunch that what’s delaying her departure is the city itself. It’s almost as if she clicked with this dying mill town in a way that’s never happened before. And of course it’s pathetically ironic that the one place where she’s starting to feel she could actually remain is on its way out, decaying into a harsh powder of warring people and evaporating industries. If she can see these signs, then why isn’t she making the normal moves, setting the process in motion again? Why isn’t she checking the trades and sorting her cassettes? Why isn’t she phoning the modeling agencies?

In the past, before she’d leave each city, Ronnie would drop some money on an expensive quirk. She’d begin by visiting a local modeling agency, paging through their layout books until she spotted a woman of approximately her own age who gave off a subtle leer. It was always something in the face, something about the positioning of the eyes and the lips. And it would have to be mildly hidden, visible only peripherally beneath a layer of disinterest, a lingerie catalogue model as opposed to a Playboy centerfold.

When she’d find the right look, Ronnie would pay for some photographs, black-and-white portraits, soft-focus head shots, the hair and lipstick perfect, the skin smooth and often translucent. Finally, before packing up the Jeep and moving on, she’d have the photographer print up a hundred eight-bytens. Then, once she was established in her new city, plugging into the repressed community psyche and starting to make some waves, invariably the letters would start to roll in, a new batch of fans requesting a photo of Ronnie Wilcox. She’d dig out her stack of head shots, sign her name across the bottom with a red felt marker, and send back a glossy of some anonymous model from a thousand miles away. And as long as Ronnie stayed in that particular city, this coolly seductive visage, this countenance radiating airbrushed carnality, would always be her image.

Ronnie pulls a plastic spoon from the pocket of her robe and starts in on the ice cream. She knows she’ll be freezing in about three minutes, but it’s a price she’s willing to pay. While she eats she starts to wonder about what Flynn would think of her fake publicity stills and this leads her to wonder: if she put a photo of herself next to a photo of the faux Ronnie, which one would Flynn choose? The subliminal nymph or the real road-woman? To be scientific, she should insert a control in the experiment, maybe some perfect suburban homemaker drawn from cooking or station wagon ads. Maybe that’s what would really hammer his button. He’s what, thirty-five, thirty-six, ripe for that settling-down mode, primed to marry the hardworking dream woman, ten years his junior, bored with her career now and ready to start pumping out a couple offspring for the breadwinner.

Suddenly, she can picture Flynn in some too-green field, pitching a whiffle ball, underhand, to a six-year-old version of himself.

She puts the pint of Haagen-Dazs down and uncaps the mescal. Get a grip, girl, she thinks, you just met this bastard.

* * *

Ronnie never knew her father. Classic abandonment story. All her mother would say was he was “in sales” and was “too handsome to be trusted.” He left one weekend, supposedly to put a deposit on a vacation rental. Instead, he cashed out the checking account, gassed up the Chevy Impala, and never came home. Ronnie was born five weeks later.

Her mother went to work as a skittish waitress willing to date the first generous tip she saw and Ronnie grew up watching the woman slide from being badly disappointed in a series of stupid and abusive men to being genuinely unbalanced. In between there were a lot of moves and two quick, horror-story marriages.

At one point between these marriages, for a short time when Ronnie was about twelve, she and her mother ended up living in a trailer park outside of Gainesville, Florida. It was here that Mother got into the habit of leaving the radio on all night. At first it drove Ronnie crazy, all these Bible Belt preachers yelling about repenting before the fires of eternal damnation consumed your evil flesh. She wanted to hear the Top Forty, pop music for the young. They reached a compromise when they found a strange AM station that was broad-casting old-fashioned radio plays. They’d lie in the dark, in the mini bunk beds, Ronnie on top, and listen to intriguing voice productions like The Invisible Man or The Tell-Tale Heart. Over the course of several weeks there were romances and detective dramas, love stories, and O. Henry adaptations.

Then one night, the narrator’s voice announced the station’s final production. He said there’d been a format change. From the top bunk in the trailer, Ronnie thought she heard her mother start to weep. She asked if everything was all right, but her mother didn’t answer. So she closed her eyes and began to listen to The Diary of Anne Frank.

In the twenty years that have passed since that night, Ronnie knows she has never been so moved and torn up and generally affected by any book or movie or song or painting or relationship. Over the course of two hours, in a pitch-black trailer, in stifling Florida, it was as if this young victim, this girl called Anne, with her intelligent voice and perfect words, had stood next to the bunk and whispered her story into Ronnie’s ear. Ronnie could see every aspect of it, the family, the movement into the attic, the others — Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan and young Peter, Miep bringing supplies to the hiding place. Ronnie balled the ends of the worn sheet that covered her legs and felt everything alongside Anne. Terror, frustration, anger, infatuation. But mostly terror, agonizing fear when a noise sounded below the attic floor, crippling worry when the food rations shrank with each merciful delivery from Miep. That night in Florida, Ronnie’s trailer became Anne Frank’s attic.

And for the next five or six years, as her mother’s condition worsened and they continued to move around America, Ronnie began to daydream, to fantasize a very elaborate, ritualized invention where she and her mother, like Anne and the Frank family, were pursued by heinous, deranged, Nazi-like men in dark uniforms and leather boots that came high up their shins. But, unlike Anne, Ronnie stayed mobile, always a step ahead of these murderous soldiers, always leading her mother to narrow escape in a new town, always using intelligence and an emotionless savvy to maneuver around the elaborate traps and roadblocks and ambushes.

The fantasies ended when Ronnie turned eighteen and her mother slid into the fully delusional. They were living near a distant cousin in upstate New York. The cousin helped place Mother in something like a nursing home where she died of a massive embolism after six months.

Ronnie doesn’t like to think about the fact that there might have been some degree of relief mixed in with her pain that day.

There turned out to be a surprise death benefit from an old life policy her mother had purchased when she was born. It was only ten grand, but it got Ronnie through two years of a junior college, where she stumbled upon the campus radio station. Her freshman year, she pushed until she got a night slot spinning late-seventies disco. And each night in that makeshift studio, fitting on the taped-up headphones and adjusting her meters, muting the Gibb brothers’ voices from the studio speakers and maybe smoking a joint in the dimness and the quiet, she’d approach a feeling that was something like the night in Gainesville, Florida, when Anne Frank’s ghost stood next to her and taught her how to be wise and strong and practical, how to survive.

In that junior college studio, Ronnie came to realize that it was possible to present yourself simply and solely as a voice. Pure voice. A ghost with no bodily presence in this world.

Sitting in that Mickey Mouse broadcasting booth, while most of the campus was studying or partying or screwing or sleeping, Ronnie dredged up the last remnants of her mother’s face and decided three things, three primary commandments that guide her life to this day:

Never put your faith in someone simply because you’ve slept with them.

Never lie to yourself.

Never stop moving.

Exactly, she thinks now. Never stop moving.

She gets up from the lounge, tightens the belt of her robe, walks to the railing, and looks down over Main Street. All the night cliques are out, a half dozen nighthawk subcultures prowling around the alleys off Main, trying to move quickly in the darkness, to wrap up their transactions before dawn. The gay hustlers and the runaway whores. The Toth clinic outpatients and the beeper-packing crack clerks. Ronnie feels like she’s watching an enormous ant farm, filled on a cruel whim with a random mixture of life-forms, who may or may not be suited to this artificial environment. And she wonders about the varying extent of their awareness. Are they conscious of their own motivations? Or are they instinctively driven by the last and best commandment, Never stop moving?

So why are you still sitting here in Solitary?

And why are you starting to screw around with a guy you could end up liking?

14

It’s four-thirty in the morning and all Hannah can think about is eating the remains of the takeout carbonara that’s sitting in her refrigerator. She knows she won’t bother to heat it. She’ll wolf it straight out of the carton, wash it down with the last of the Chablis. On the drive home she realized, in an instantaneous and almost shocking way, just how hungry she was. Crossing Hoffman Square she flashed on the carbonara, pictured it sitting on the fridge shelf like a forgotten Christmas gift that turned out to be exactly what she’d wanted. As she pulled in behind the house and killed the engine she sat in the car for an extra few seconds, thinking about the sad fact that even if there was some mate, some devoted insomniac lover, waiting on the other side of her apartment door, some caring and thoughtful individual who’d spent the last hour preparing something hot and delicious and nourishing, she’d still want the cold carbonara. She wonders if this is a sign she should always stay single.

She scoops her mail off the top stair where Mrs. Acker leaves it every afternoon and lets herself into her apartment, the middle unit of an old wood-frame three-decker opposite St. Matthias Hospital. She’s lived in the same place for over five years now. Mrs. Acker lives on the first floor with a Rottweiler named Franz, after her late husband. The top floor has been empty since Mr. Bradbury died last spring.

Hannah loves the apartment, a spacious two-bedroom with all-natural wood, antique brass fixtures everywhere, and eleven-foot-high ceilings. The rent is more than reasonable and she’s got a full-sized kitchen and this enormous old bathtub with claw legs. Sometimes she considers approaching Mrs. Acker about eventually buying the place. Maybe they could work out some sort of arrangement, an agreed-upon price, or at least something like a right of first refusal. It’d be a sensible investment and the rents would make the mortgage workable.

She steps into the kitchen, locks the door behind her, flips on the fluorescent ceiling light, and slides off her jeans jacket. She throws the jacket over the back of a kitchen chair, pulls open the refrigerator, and takes out an empty Gallo bottle. She drops the bottle in the trash, pulls out a beer, and twists off the cap. She squats down in front of the refrigerator and searches for the carbonara. But it’s nowhere to be found. She opens the crisper and the meat keeper, shoves aside the orange juice carton and a half dozen yogurt containers and the Tupperware that she knows is filled with a week-old, decaying salad, but there’s no pasta anywhere.

“I’m losing it,” she whispers to herself, pulls out a blueberry yogurt, then puts it back and opens the freezer. She pulls down a pint of fudge swirl gourmet ice cream, yanks off the lid, and throws it in the trash next to the wine bottle as a sign of total commitment.

She grabs a soup spoon from the drawer and goes to work, standing the whole time at the counter, leafing halfheartedly through the mail. There’s a music club offer, her Visa statement, her electric bill, a lingerie catalogue, a donation request from some cancer society, a donation request from some children’s relief society, and Mr. Bradbury’s Reader’s Digest. Since the old man died, Mrs. Acker has been giving Hannah all his magazines.

There’s also a medium-sized padded manila mailer. Hannah’s name and address are printed in black block letters in the very center of the package. There’s no return address and there’s no stamp or cancellation mark.

Hannah puts her spoon in her mouth and tears open the package. She pulls out a notebook. A common drugstore notebook, the kind a kid would take to school. It’s got a brown cardboard cover and spiral binding down the side. The cover says “Saint Ignatius” in Gothic lettering.

An odd, cold feeling starts up in her stomach. She puts the soup spoon down on the countertop and opens to the first page of the notebook. Her eyes fall on the handwriting. She immediately grabs the envelope again and turns it over, looking for something more. But there’s nothing beyond her name and address. No markings. No sign of origin.

She looks back to the words printed on the first page and there’s no way to deny the fact that this is Lenore Thomas’s notebook. The writing is smaller than normal for Lenore, but it’s unmistakable — the abundance of ink, the rigidity of angles on certain letters, the deep imprint that results from too much pressure exerted on the nub of the pen.

Hannah lets her thumb fan through a run of pages. Lenore has crammed as much writing as possible into the notebook. And not just writing. There are lists of unattached words, crude graphs, even a rough sketch or two. And hundreds of arrows pointing from one passage — or proper name or dollar amount or quotation — to another. It’s like the nighttime jottings of an obsessive scientist plagued by a difficult theory. Or the diary of a half-mad monk looking for an absolute proof of the Divine. Or the work journal of a drug-whacked poet plotting a unified field theory in the gorgeous words of a newly invented language.

She opens randomly to some middle page and sees a whirlpool of words, written and printed in a slightly circular pattern, tied together only by the arrow marks Lenore has drawn between them. Some of the words Hannah understands. Others she instinctively doesn’t want to. But the look of the page holds her, and it occurs to her that, maybe, rather than read the page normally, she’d have better luck deciphering it by viewing it as a picture.

Hannah flips to the last page and sees that Lenore has written End of Notebook One.

Meaning, Hannah muses, there must be more to come.

But goddamn it, Lenore, I don’t want any more. I want you to leave me alone. I don’t want your mannerisms and I don’t want your gestures and I don’t want your attitudes. And I don’t want your voice. I do not want your voice. But it keeps happening. It started out innocently. I’d be down Bangkok and I’d be scared and I’d try to think of exactly how you’d move and exactly what you’d say. And it got easier and easier. And it got results. But now it’s like I have this parasite inside of me. Feeding off of me. And it’s growing and I’m getting smaller. I don’t want to be your ghost, Lenore. Leave me alone, Lenore. I don’t want your voice. I don’t.

She closes the notebook, then opens it again near the rear, just pages from the end. She runs her hand over the writing. There’s a slight skim-coat of some kind of grainy dust, as if the notebook had been dropped on a beach of red sand.

She brushes the dust away and it sticks to her palm. She brings her palm to her nose, smells nothing, brings it to her mouth, and licks at her skin, then, without thinking, she takes the notebook under her arm and walks into her bedroom. Without putting on a light, she goes to her closet, opens the door, reaches up to a high shelf, and pulls down a brown gunmetal strongbox. She reaches into her pants pocket and takes out a key, turns the lock, and opens the box. She reaches behind to her belt holster, draws out her Magnum, and places it inside. Then she slides Lenore’s notebook underneath the gun, relocks the box, and puts it back on the closet shelf.

She stands for a second before the closet door. Then she moves to her bureau and looks at herself in the mirror. She leans in, pulls down the skin at the corners of her eyes, and mutters, “I’ve got to get more sleep.”

She turns on the digital clock radio on the bureau and the room fills up with music, an old tune that used to be a favorite of Lenore’s. She sticks her tongue out to her mirror image and tries to inspect it as Warren Zevon sings:

… in walks the village idiot

and his face is all aglow

he’s been up all night listening to

Mohammed’s radio …

She places a hand over her mouth and when she swallows, there’s an ache all the way down her throat. She remembers she’s out of aspirin, then she starts back toward the kitchen, hoping there’s another bottle of wine in the cabinet. And trying to ignore the feeling that’s already started to grow in her stomach.

15

WQSG is running a 7 A.M. traffic update — advice on how to maneuver around a three-car pileup at the Hoffman Square Rotary — when they’re hit. First there’s the three standard bursts of static followed by the signature trumpet blast. It could be a loop from an old Sphere bootleg. The rumor down the Canal Zone is that the brothers are fans.

Then QSG is history and O’ZBON comes alive.

Aloha. Shalom. Buenos días. And sorry for the interruption, but the only traffic problems you need worry about are the locations of the roadblocks between truth and deception, the blockades between illusion and reality, the police horses separating belonging from isolation. And that’s what we’re here for.

Brother John speaks the gospel truth, friends. I want to start off the day by grabbing the broadcast bull by his antennae-horns, as it were. Juan and I have heard down the pipe that there’s some dispute going ’round as to the authenticity of these transmissions. I had a feeling this might happen. If mon frère cares to remember, I mentioned just such a possibility during our sojourn up and down Route 66 a couple years back, during the St. Ti Jean Pilgrimage that my obsessive bro insisted upon. I think we were in Denver, trying to catch a little overdue Z-time in a trailer parked down on Laramie Street. It was hot and we’d chugged way too much joe from the endless thermos and came to review the fond memories of our breakthrough days back in the old hometown. My question was, should the heat ever back down to temperate and we cruise northeast like some mutant Irish salmon, would the apostles embrace us all over again? Or would it be rerun season and we end up stuck in that episode of Post-Easter Blues with special guest star Doubting Thomas? Well, Johnny-boy puts down his muchthumbed copy of Flashes of Moriarty to castigate yours truly over blaspheming the faithful. He says that if we headed back to the Q-town hills, within forty-eight hours word’d be blasting through the Canal Zone that the brothers were back in town and Radio Free Subterranea was about to queue up. I let the issue lie and dipped back into an old P. A. Taylor mystery. But lo and behold, a few years roll by, we slide from the headlines, the FCC turns its worry beads on the morning drivetime shock-jocks, and the coast starts to look clear for a homecoming. We make some arrangements, alert kin, and prepare security. And start the long haul out of May-he-ko — that’s right, who guessed correctly? — and make the Quinsigamond borders by the end of last month. It takes a week to retool and upgrade the old equipment, but finally we make the big comeback broadcast.

[Pause]

And what’s the first feedback we hear? “It’s not them, man.” “Couldn’t be the O’Zebedees.” “No way. They’re still tending bar in Dublin. These guys are a weak imitation.” Fine. Break my heart some more, you little ingrates. What is it you need to be sure? Would you like to press your hand into our old cart-deck? How about probe our microphone ports with your fingers? Would that do the trick?

Whoa, boy, calm it down. Here, take mine, it’s decaf. Hello, friends, Brother John, back again. As you can hear, you’ve done some momentous upsetting in the heart of the boy wonder. I’ve tried to salve the wounds with ancient adages — no man’s a prophet in his own market share. But though he proclaims otherwise, I think your suspiciousness genuinely surprised him. He expected more from the hard core, as the saying goes. My own feeling is, you stay on top of the mountain by giving the people what they want. So if it’s proof you need, we’ll try to come up with some irrefutable evidence that we’re the one and only, genuine, original saboteurs. Until we can think of something airtight, however, I’m going to have to ask you to try to have faith. It’s the honest-to-Marconi James and John, no matter what your ears tell you.

Yo, hermano, the timer says we just passed our safety margin.

That means it’s time to recede into the caverns from which we came. Keep the ears peeled ’cause we’ll be back. And until then, Hic Calix.