Wireless

16

Normally, the small bathroom off Flynn’s office is a little sanctuary, a solitary free zone where he can steal five minutes from the day and browse through his collection of rare old Shadow magazines. Today, it’s more like a holding cell or an isolation booth from some upscale, impossible game show.

He leans the weight of his body against the black lacquered sink, stares at his Cartier watch. He can feel a sweat breaking under the Bill Blass suit and, though he knows it will do no good, he taps on the top of the Grundig, slaps at its side like it was a clogged parking meter.

“Bound to happen,” he whispers. “Should have known.”

The Grundig is an antique. Flynn rescued it from a flea market seven years ago. He has it mounted on a shelf over the toilet. He keeps the original handbook in a sealed Baggie under the radio. The handbook is entirely in German, a language Flynn can neither speak nor read.

“Son of a bitch, come on,” he whispers.

He comes forward, leans over the toilet, presses his ear to the mesh that covers the speaker. A squeal of interference sounds and he steps back awkwardly. There’s a few seconds of static and then:

… and for those among the faithful who worship the voice of the goddess, the brothers will try to vamoose by ten …

Flynn lets out a lungful of nervous air, comes forward again, plants a kiss on the mesh, and laughs at himself. He runs some cold water over his hands, splashes some on his face, dries off with a towel, and looks at himself in the mirror. Thin traces of pink vein run through his eyes. He’s gotten maybe two hours of sleep. He’s definitely not at the top of his form for the coming pitch. The phone call from Wallace came at 3 A.M., just as he was climbing into bed. He couldn’t catch all the words. The dwarf’s voice was high and frantic, something about meeting him at the hospital, something about 01-ga’s accident and questions from the police. He’d driven to St. Matthias dressed in sweats and slippers and only been allowed into Olga’s room for a few seconds. She looked so tiny in the mechanical bed, swimming in the pale blue johnny and the frayed sheets. She was wrapped like a fragile, shrunken mummy and medicated into a sleep that Flynn hoped was beyond pain. In the corridor he’d paced with Wallace and tried to get the story straight. The Brownings had come home from their dance. They’d both had a few drinks. Olga had gone down to the rec room for some reason, tripped on the first stair, and fallen the rest of the way. Everything else out of Wallace’s mouth was a jumble — words about the look on the doctor’s face in the E.R., a visit with some young cop with a clipboard and a series of endless questions. He kept looking up at Flynn, wringing his hands, saying, in that awful cracking voice, “She’ll be all right, won’t she, G.T.?” When the sun started to come up, Flynn finally talked Wallace into going home. He looked away as the dwarf climbed up on a metal stool to kiss his wife’s bandage-swathed cheek, then followed after Wallace in the Saab till his friend was safely back home. He’d gotten back to his own place by six, sprawled in the dentist’s chair for a couple hours, taken a hot shower, and swilled some black coffee.

Now he shakes his head and opens the medicine cabinet, takes out the Visine and shakes drops into each eye, towels off again, and looks in the mirror a last time.

“Okay, G.T.,” he says, “time to make some coin.”

He runs through a series of deep breaths, squares his shoulders back, flattens down a rumple in the front of the suit, tightens his tie. He brings his hands up so they block his face in the mirror, interlocks the fingers, and cracks the knuckles elaborately.

Then he clears his throat, takes a last breath, forms his mouth into a humble smile, and exits the bathroom.

Mr. and Mrs. Miller are seated in front of his desk, sunk deep into the buttery leather chairs Flynn had special-ordered from Europe. The rest of his office, his whole building for that matter, is authentically Victorian. Five years back, when he first purchased the property, he hired a pricy decorator and paid through the nose to bring the whole place back to its original 1875 look. The hand-cut sign hanging out front that reads was modeled on a genuine Yankee shingle on display in the city’s historical society archives.

G.T. Flynn CFP, CLU

Life Insurance

and

Estate Planning

But Flynn had to pull an annoying compromise when it came to the customer chairs. He split with the decorator over this issue. He couldn’t make her see that the chairs were part of a larger, intricate process, a ritual or ceremony, a subtle but complex therapy. He couldn’t convey to her that the chairs were an essential cog in the wheel of the coin, a strut that sat next to Flynn’s voice, eye contact, the lighting of the room, and, most of all, the words, the individual signifiers that linked together in a logic chain and formed something larger — a picture, an image, a 3-D full-color hologram of total security and peace of mind. He needed the clientele to sink down into that expensive leather until they felt almost weightless, or better, until they felt like they were floating in saline, womb-rooted again, protected from the horrible glare of air-breathing life.

He stops in the doorway to make the judgment call. They look ready, he decides, so he starts to walk to the desk, lets them see he’s relaxed, unhurried, unpressured, as if he were walking toward a summertime hammock on a farmhouse porch.

He takes his seat behind the antique, hand-scrolled Chip-pendale desk and says, “Sorry about the interruption.” He smiles and nods his head.

There have been times, instances set up just like this, when his voice box failed him and his first crucial, tone-setting words came out in a squawk or, worse, a phlegmy, throat-clogged rasp. Now he’s superstitious about the first words. He keeps an old-time atomizer in the bathroom medicine cabinet and a jar of honey in the mini-fridge.

“Well, Mr. and Mrs. Miller — let me ask, do you mind if I call you Bob and Carol?”

The man shakes his head and the woman says, “We call him Bo at home.”

Flynn smiles, addresses the man, “Should I call you Bo? You tell me.”

Bo shrugs and mumbles, “Fine.”

The guy is uncomfortable, not someone used to this kind of meeting. Flynn is going to have to change that, adjust some of the pitch up front, make things familiar.

“Well, you can both call me G.T. My high school catcher hung that on me and it stuck.”

“Played ball?” Bo asks.

“Oh, yeah,” Flynn says, low voice, breaking eye contact momentarily as if embarrassed. “All the way through college.” He flinches but manages to hide it. “Anyway, I think you’ll both find there are no formalities in this office. Now, before we begin, can I get either one of you a refreshment? Cup of coffee or tea? Bo, I got a cold one back there, if you’d like.”

Bo shakes him off and Carol says, “We’re all set right now.”

“Okay, great, just let me know if you change your mind. Now”—he slides open a drawer and brings a manila folder up onto the desktop—“I’ve had a chance to look over your informational sheets here. I hope they weren’t too much of a bear to fill out.”

“They were no problem,” Bo says.

Bo could be tough. If things get too bad, he’ll refocus all his energy and pitch directly to Carol.

“That’s great. I’m telling you, some of the forms these days, I don’t know, the banks are the worst. Couple years back I went in for a car loan. Simple car loan, okay? It was like a trip to a blind dentist. You needed a degree from MIT just to fill out page one.”

“You looked over our papers?” Bo asks.

Flynn looks up from the desk, stares into Bo’s eyes. You can’t cajole this guy. He lets the smile drift off his lips. You can’t friendly this guy into signing the papers. He looks back down to the desk, takes a second, closes the folder. He looks up at Carol, over to Bo, back to Carol again. He changes strategy, fades into the tone of a legendary grammar school principal.

“Says here you have three children?”

“Three girls,” Carol says.

“Three girls, that’s wonderful. Terrific. You wouldn’t have a photo by any chance?”

It’s a dangerous play. Used to be a standard, but in this day and age, when you’ve got molesters pictured on the front page every other night, it’s risky. They could question your motives, get a little queasy.

Carol goes into her handbag, takes out the wallet, slips a color shot from a plastic sleeve, and hands it across the desk to him. Flynn starts a long, unblinking stare at the picture, like he’s trying to translate an ancient language. Then he starts to nod and asks, without looking up, without directing himself to either one of them, in a purposefully unfriendly voice, “How’d you two meet?”

Neither one was prepared for that question. They were both expecting something about the kids, a question about the girls’ ages, what schools they attended.

Bo says, “I, I …,” and Carol jumps in with, “High school. We were in the same class—”

Flynn cuts her off, his voice sucked clean of emotion, “So you’d both be the same age?”

“Bo’s a few months—”

“Approximately the same age? Born the same year?”

“The same year, yes, nineteen—”

“Any other dependents?”

There’s a pause. He assumes they’re looking at each other, one of them trying to come up with the nerve to just walk out. But he continues staring at the photo until Bo says, “Just the girls. Just the ones in the picture there.”

Flynn’s been waiting for Bo’s voice and it comes out just right — tentative, too unsure for anger or action. A little helpless.

In front of Flynn, at the top of the desk, is a heavy brass pen holder, an antique, a long flat base with the Flynn family crest engraved on it and two floutlike stems that jut up and can pivot on a secured ball bearing. He reaches out and grabs the piece, turns it around with one hand so that the two Mont Blancs point out toward Bo and Carol. Then, delicately, he places the picture of the three girls in front, leans it against the pens like a small easel, so the faces of the children beam up at the parents.

He comes forward in his seat, rests his weight on his arms and elbows, seems to push his upper body toward them.

In a low voice, the voice of some anguished last-century minister, he says, “I want five minutes of your time to tell you a story. You’re not beholden to me at all. If there’s some reason you’re no longer interested in my services, then you’re free to go. I don’t require an explanation or an apology. But I’d like to give you this story to keep. A little token of this night. Okay? No matter what happens after you leave, if we never see one another again, all right, I want you to hear this story. Will you do that?”

They do what he wants. They nod rather than answer.

He takes a deep breath, like an Olympic swimmer about to leap from his pedestal. And he begins.

“All right, then. This is about a man with a lot of ambition. Great tenacity. What you and I would most likely consider a good man. He makes a family early in life, cares for them to the best of his ability. I look at you. I study the two of you. I see you understand this man’s motivations. You share his sense of what is and is not important in this life. Let’s name the things. Let’s say them and judge them. Fame? No, I don’t think so. Luxury? No, unnecessary. Status? No, empty, subjective. Power? No. Travel? Adventure? Simple no. Family? …” A slight pause. “Okay, all right. Family. Correct? Kin. Blood. The love and caring of man, woman, child. Yes? I think so. You have to choose what to make an effort for. You’re given so many years. You don’t even know how many. It’s a gamble. The average man gets what? What is it today? I’m no actuary, but it’s coming in around seventy-two years. Little more for the women. That’s the average. Do you get more? Less? There’s only one person who knows that. He’s not telling. Not on this earth, he’s not. So you make the choice. Whether you know it or not, you weigh the alternatives. The different avenues of this lifetime. Independence, self-interest, no worry. You’re young at some point. You say, ‘I could be in the Caribbean, I could sail chartered catamarans, live in a shack, sleep in the sun half the day.’ You say, maybe, ‘Vegas, Learn to be a blackjack dealer. Different showgirl every night,’ huh? You say, ‘I’m a beautiful young girl, fresh out of high school, I’ll go to New York, take the stage by storm, champagne and flowers in the dressing room,’ huh? I don’t think so. You made the choices. Like the man in the story, you took the route — husband, wife, family. You found the job. You found the house. You raced to the hospital, four A.M., the contractions coming faster, the water breaking on the cart into maternity, the pain. You brought her home. Look at the picture there, people, you brought the little girl home. It begins. Number two, number three. Days pass, you clean the house, you buy the used cars, you go to parents’ night. Hamburger Helper twice a week, so what? The guys from high school, all getting together, going fishing, beautiful lake, upstate New York — uh-uh, no can do, sorry, guys. You get the legal pad out, late at night, April, tax time, Carson’s in the background, your mate’s asleep in the easy chair, you can hear the breathing. You’ve walked down the hall, looked in their bedroom, checked to make sure the covers are pulled up, no bad dreams or stomachaches. You go back to the legal pad. You start a list, things that will come up, no question, orthodontist bills, piano lessons, maybe a second car when the first one gets the license, God help us. You play with numbers. You rearrange things, try to figure the best case and the worst. The promotion comes through. The promotion does not come through. You go in, talk to the others at work, get some feedback. They’re not experts, granted, but they’re honest working people, like yourself. They’ve got kids of their own. They’re struggling like everyone else. Everyone’s got an opinion. There doesn’t seem to be any consensus. Some go with payroll savings. All well and good. Secure. Certainly secure, no question. But the time against the return, who knows what’s right? Others stick with a pass-book. They can see the interest accrue in black and white. Some have the brother-in-law who’ll pick the stocks, the investments. They’ve got faith. He’s family and he’s done okay for himself. Still others buy long chains of lottery tickets on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Who knows? It keeps coming back to that — who knows? And you know the question is only going to get louder. ’Cause after the braces and the Yamaha upright and the eight-year-old Cutlass Supreme that eats too much gas, after those comes college, the all-time backbreaker. What? Twenty grand a year? By then, could be fifty grand a year. But you don’t care. You know you have to do it. No other choice. ’Cause outside of marrying a prince, she’ll be flipping burgers sixty-plus hours a week. Now you say, this is in the future, mister, this is abstract, this is a lot of theorizing, speculating, sky-is-falling crap. Okay, fair enough. Let’s pull it down to earth for you. Let’s ground the conversation, put it squarely in the here and now. I told you this was a story. I’ll add now, just to make certain, clarify in case any doubt exists, this is a true story. This is factual. Historical. I told you about a good man, like yourselves. Family man. Chose those same avenues. Lived responsibly. Sacrificed. Did everything right to the best of his ability. But there was one ability lacking. Small but crucial ability. You know, right? You know already. Foresight. Can’t have enough of it. But you can’t purchase it. You can’t go to school for it. It’s part of your nature or it isn’t. The particular man we’re talking about, the hero, you might say, of our story here, went the passbook route. Okay. You can see it. You can picture him, can’t you, gets off shift, stops by the local branch on the way home, dumps, what, ten, fifteen percent into the little blue passbook inside the scratched-up plastic envelope. The teller runs the book through the machine. The man sort of bounces on the balls of his feet, trying to listen to the sound of the machine as it calculates and then prints out this month’s interest on the little white page. The teller hands him back the book, he steps to the side, lets the next customer move ahead. He opens to the current page and stares, reassures himself they’ve given him his due. Then one day, on the way home from the bank, the man, forty-seven years old and hasn’t been out sick from work in over two years, he has a coronary. Massive heart attack. Car crashes into a telephone pole over on Chin Avenue. But he’s dead before the impact. He’s dead behind the wheel. That’s it. No need for the jaws of life. No need for the EMTs and those electroshock paddles there. He’s gone. Forty-seven. Dead.”

Flynn takes the first real break, allows himself a long, audible breath. It’s a necessary risk. The worry is that he won’t find exactly the same voice tone, that the set of the face might change. But he knows he’s got them. They’re rigid in their seats. No amount of buttery, imported Italian leather can comfort these two now. He drops his eyes, for just the briefest second, down to the desk, closes them slowly, bites his top lip, and reopens the eyes.

“You want to take the guess?” he asks. “Either one of you? ’Cause you’re right. The guy in the story was my old man.”

The second pause, this time just heavy breathing.

“Excuse my language, but forty-seven goddamn years old. Yeah, I’m still a little bitter. And I’m sorry for that. But I was just ten years old at the time. And my brothers and sisters were even younger. And, I’m sorry, but unless it’s happened to you, you can’t, you don’t …”

He takes a minute, pauses, then starts again. “Here’s the point. The story doesn’t end there. Not by a long shot. There’s burial insurance, okay, and there’s that passbook savings account. But at forty-seven you haven’t built up too big a pension. And you’ve got a mortgage that’s not even half paid off.”

Fourth pause. The briefest so far.

“My mom went back to work, but we still had to sell the house, moving in with some relatives who tried their hardest not to resent us. I’m not trying to say we were the Job family or anything. I’m sure you could match me story for story. There are plenty of people out there who’ve been dealt worse. Deformities. Lingering diseases. Mental illness. No question. But this isn’t my point. I’m not bartering for sympathy. The past is the past. Let it go. Look ahead. Fine. I did okay. You can see that. There are visible signs of that all around you right now, as we speak. But let me tell you something, and if you think I’m blowing my own horn, so be it. I’m the exception, not the rule. I worked hard. And let’s say it, I got some lucky breaks. I’m the first to admit this. You can’t purchase luck. I crawled out of the hole that was left when my old man’s heart blew up. Others in my family, God help them, haven’t been so lucky. You know what I’m saying. Every extended family can tell the same stories. The lost jobs, the drugs, the failed marriages. It’s a tough life. We agree. I try to help out as best I can. And not just with the money stick, if you follow. I’ve got a sister, and I don’t want to get too personal here, but we think she’s in Florida. I say ‘think’ because we don’t know. Last heard from her six months ago. My mother’s heart. You can imagine. Okay, enough about me and mine. The thing is, we could not, capital C, capital N, could not have prevented our father’s death. No way. When it’s time, it’s time. But with a little foresight, things could have been very, very different in the wake of that death. A little planning and maybe we could have kept the house. Maybe we could have paid for a few college educations. I delivered pizza till four A.M., four years, just to get through State. Maybe, with a little adequate planning, some of my siblings could’ve gotten some counseling before it was too late. Here are the questions: Could the old man have afforded some life insurance? Well, he afforded the passbook, right? Huh? There are always options. You can’t cut the whole life, bang, go with the term. There’s never been more flexibility. Never been more possibilities to provide for a family.”

The last pause. A long look from his face to hers.

“Bo. Carol. You made some choices. You made some sacrifices. You’re on your way down the road of your life. Do me this favor. Do me one favor, all right? Tonight. Eleven o’clock tonight. The local news is going on, okay? Walk away from the set. Get up out of the chair and walk down the corridor. Together. I’m serious. Literally do this. You stop at the bedrooms. You look in the door. Study those little faces, sound asleep, total faith that Mom and Dad have everything under control. Okay? Look hard. Then you picture those faces about ten, fifteen years down the road. And now here’s the hard part. Mom, or Dad, or, God forbid, both, are gone. They’re not there anymore to keep things under control. And you, and I mean both of you, ask these questions: Where are they living? Where are they sleeping at night? Who’s buying their clothes? Their Christmas presents? Who’s going to put them through school? Pay for the weddings? Tough questions? Yes. Absolutely. But they need answers. Those little girls, sound asleep in that dim room, need those questions answered. By you two. You’re the only ones.”

A shrug. A raising of the eyebrows.

“What’s the answer, Carol? What do you say, Bo?”

There they are, two puddles of anxiety, two terrified gobs of flesh, sweating onto the leather arms of the chairs, looking at each other, choked throats, swelling tongues.

Bo actually says it: “I don’t know.”

Flynn finally sits back in his chair and heaves an almost genuine sigh. “I know you don’t. That’s why I’m here.”

It’s another half hour to the signatures at the bottom of the policy. Flynn reads from the preprinted form about the required AIDS test. Carol writes out the check, a rectangle of paper decorated with beagle puppies. Bo gives the name of their family doctor and makes a mild joke about the urine specimen.

At the front door, Carol actually gives Flynn a hug and Bo bursts out in a thrilled laugh. He pumps Flynn’s hand, thanks him earnestly. Flynn walks them both to the sidewalk, a hand on each of their backs. He beseeches them to bring the girls by someday, promises Bo a pair of complimentary Red Sox tickets, stands waving, smiling, as they drive away in a Ford wagon.

Back inside, Flynn locks the doors and starts to shut down the office. He’s meticulous about this, making sure each light is out, each monitor shut off. He sets the alarm, then exits up the spiral staircase to his apartment. He’s anxious to get into his study. Though his office and apartment are entirely Victorian, his study is strictly contemporary — all high-tech minimalist done in blacks and whites. Flynn loves the idea that no one looking at the outside of the building could imagine the study’s interior. One just doesn’t lead to the other.

He removes his suitcoat, goes to the bathroom, and splashes cold water on his face again. He dries off, looking in the mirror, thinking that maybe it’s true, in some alternate universe or some dream life, maybe it’s true that his father died at a young age, that he has troubled brothers and sisters, that fate dealt his family a rough hand. But in this conscious life, Flynn was still raised by an army of meat-fisted, ancient nuns at The Galilee Home for Boys.

It’s been a good night. The Millers weren’t a huge sale, but Flynn would rather a consistent number of medium-sized policies anyway, a couple a week, middle-class folk who’ll never restructure the package, never borrow against the pot, always pay the premium a month before it’s due. And the only thing they’ll want in return is the free calendar, at Christmastime, with enormous, hyper-clear photos of selected national parks. I’m telling you, Carol, we’ve got to get to Yosemite.

Flynn undresses, hangs up his suit carefully, no creases, pocket flaps out. He changes into the gray cotton pants he picked up in Japan last year and a black-on-black sweater with just the slightest hint of turtleneck. He goes to the refrigerator, pours himself a Gatorade from a glass pitcher, moves to the answering machine, and hits the flashing button.

Hello, Flynn, it’s Hazel. I think we’ve got some problems. I’ll talk to you tonight.

G.T., it’s Wallace. Just wanted to let you know I’ve spoken with the doctors and Olga’s condition is stable. Sorry about last night. See you at Wireless. And G.T., could we keep the whole accident to ourselves?

He heads for the study, unlocks the reinforced sliding doors, rolls them back into the wall, leaves the lights off. He likes the kind of shadows he can get in this room, the way natural light will play off the ugly industrial-metal shelving that covers all the spare wall space. The study is soundproof. The floor is covered with a special, hard-to-get carpeting that the importer promised would “soak up eighty to ninety percent of your basic foot-level sound.” The carpet is odd-feeling under his feet. It makes the floor seem to dip in places as you cross the room. It’s a bland industrial gray, unpatterned. So far, Flynn thinks the importer told the truth.

At the far end of the room, in place of a desk, Flynn has an antique dentist’s chair complete with accompanying instrument pedestal, a big cold turret with jointed arms of drill, water gun, suction tube, fluorescent lights. There’s a round, swing-over tray attached to the pedestal and he uses this as a desktop. It suits his needs perfectly.

The rest of the room looks a lot like a small electronics warehouse. The rows of bolted-together metal racks give a hard-to-name glow to the room, an earthtone of some kind, partly dull green, partly gray-brown. The shelves are filled with stacks of boxy, matte-black hardware — world-band receivers, amps, equalizers, boosters, and recorders. Lined up on the shelf closest to the dentist’s chair are three Otari MTR-12 reel-to-reel recorders. On the shelf below them is an Icom IC-9000 receiver stacked atop a Japan Radio backup unit.

Flynn moves to the first reel-to-reel, hits the rewind toggle, waits a beat, hits the play toggle, and folds his arms across his chest. From the Bose speaker issues his own voice:

“—you took the route — husband, wife, family. You found the job. You found the house. You raced to the hospital, four A.M., the contractions coming faster, the water breaking on the cart into maternity, the pain. You brought her home. Look at the picture there, people, you brought the little girl home. It begins. Number two, number three. Days pass, you clean the house, you buy the used cars, you go to parents’ night. Hamburger Helper twice a week, so what?—”

Flynn massages his forehead with the tips of his fingers, then runs his hands back through his hair until he links his fingers behind his head. He does a minute of deep breathing, but images from last night at the airport start to flood, so he grabs the cordless phone off the swing tray and quickly punches in some numbers.

When Ferrie answers, Flynn says, “Open up the museum and tell the crybabies to sit down. I’m coming in to solve the whole feud.”

17

Ronnie knows there are things she should be doing. There’s two weeks’ worth of laundry sitting in the hamper and she hasn’t given the apartment a cleaning in at least that long. She should get the Jeep washed, do some banking, shop for a few groceries.

Instead she continues to lie on her stomach in the unmade bed, lazily eating the last of a bowl of Wheaties and washing the soggy flakes down with a generous Bloody Mary. The radio is tuned to some station out of Boston, one of those yuppie jobs that play soft jazz on the weekend mornings, music that starts out sort of relaxing and after an hour turns cloying. Ronnie doesn’t care. She just wants some white noise. And she definitely doesn’t want to hear WQSG.

It’s 10 A.M. on a Saturday. She’s looking at a self-help quiz in a magazine someone had left at the station. It’s one of those glossy fashion rags that run fifty pages of photos showing hundred-pound models with thick lips and sculpted bodies, followed by an article on “Why You Have a Poor Selfimage.”

The quiz is entitled “Do I Fear Intimacy?” and it’s illustrated with a black-and-white, shadowy photo of a man and a woman, both with wavy hair covering their shoulders. Both have wildly pronounced cheekbones. The couple is standing in some indistinct, urban alleyway. The man has his head inclined toward the woman. And she’s holding him at bay with her arm extended straight out and the palm of her hand pushing at his chest.

Ronnie stares at the photo for a few minutes before reading the first question. She thinks maybe there’s a way to determine why the couple is in an inner-city alley. There isn’t, so she grabs a felt marker from the nightstand and begins testing herself.

At first, the questions are pretty straightforward. You can see how they relate to the problem of intimacy. But halfway through the quiz they’re suddenly hitting her with “How often do you eat fast food?” and “How many times a month do you go to the movies?”

This line of questioning annoys Ronnie, but she persists and at the end she tallies her score and checks it against the score key. She rates in the bottom category, summed up with the explanation: “You are an island unto yourself. Your failure to share your life and open your heart to even your closest of lovers is deeply rooted in your past. Therapy beckons. Don’t give up hope. With time, patience, and hard work you can overcome your clammish ways and learn to share life and love with a giving partner.”

She throws the magazine against the wall and guzzles the last of the Bloody Mary. Then she rolls onto the edge of the bed, comes upright into a sitting position, runs her hands through her hair, looks at her watch, and says out loud, “I think we need to get some air.”

A half hour later, she’s showered, dressed in jeans, a red cotton sweater, and her oldest, favorite Keds. She steers the Jeep down Ziesing Ave and cranks up the volume on the radio as Chrissie Hynde belts out the end of “Thin Line Between Love and Hate,” then she pulls into the curb in front of a storefront that sports an enormous orange neon sign on the roof that blinks the words

Shockwave Riders

A Fantastic Fiction Bookshop

Ziesing Ave has become known as Bookstore Boulevard over the past couple of years. In addition to Shockwave, there’s Ephraim Beck’s, which specializes in mystery literature, Doc Kerrigan’s, which has the best poetry stock west of Boston, and Alexandria, which comprises two full floors of the old Streeter Mill and is filled to bursting with tens of thousands of used, unsorted, unpriced volumes.

Ronnie cuts the engine but sits in the Jeep for a minute studying the store. She’s never been inside, but drives past it several times a week and always gets a little jolt, a quick aesthetic buzz that she’s never bothered to analyze. Now, for the first time, she looks closer at the building and sees the extent of effort that went into its design.

The owner, Toby Odets, is a scion of one of the city’s oldest families and he dumped a good chunk of his trust fund into the renovation of a standard wood-frame, brick facade box of a store. Toby was determined to make the structure reflect the concerns of his stock and trade and he spared no expense in transforming the three thousand square feet of raw space into some kind of gleaming, immaculate jet age that never existed. He drew up the design himself, stealing liberally from Streamline Moderne and the Googie School, but straining it all through the sieve of his unique sensibility until it came out looking like a lost movie set from some high-budget 1950s drive-in space opera.

Toby started with the roof and erected a stainless-steel pylon, a sleek useless antennalike tower that was encircled by seven equidistant loops of different-colored neon. These circles of light flashed on and off in sequential order, bottom to top. At the lip of the roof he placed the neon Shockwave sign, then fashioned a soaring delta-wing canopy that shot out at its base and hung over the sidewalk like the streamlined fin of a comic book rocket. The edges of the wing were outfitted with a string of marquee-style blinking bulbs, alternating reds and whites. Extending from the front wall of the shop at a sharp angle to the sidewalk, Toby bolted mock-steel girders adorned with huge, functionless bolts and random-sized portholes. The two display windows were exaggerated bubbles of Plexiglas that dissolved into a stainless-steel fronting with all the corners rounded away.

Like walking into an antique spaceship, Ronnie thinks. I should have worn my steel-cone bra.

She looks at her watch, gets out of the Jeep, and moves inside. The interior of the shop is no less striking than the outside. The ceiling is high, maybe a full twelve feet, and it’s composed of some kind of chrome or aluminum, some reflective metal, worked into a series of concentric circles that culminates in a good-sized, multipointed, crystal-looking star that hangs dead center like a Martian chandelier. The walls are done in black and white deco tile and they’re covered with artwork taken from dozens of 1930s science fiction pulps, classic stuff from names like Earl K. Bergey and Frank R. Paul and Howard V. Brown. There are pictures of bullet-shaped spaceships with gaping holes torn through them by an asteroid storm. There’s a future city of glass, built in ascending tiers, being shattered by a massive tidal wave. There are flying insects as big as Buicks doing battle with laser-cannon-equipped sailors of tomorrow. The art is all framed by tubes of red neon. Ronnie thinks Toby Odets’s electric bill must be backbreaking.

She starts to wander the aisles. The display racks are sloping metal frames that mimic the I-beam design outside. A sign mounted on the rear wall announces 100,000 Volumes Always in Stock The Infinity speakers on the wall fill the room with Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report. The store is busy for a Saturday morning. There are a half dozen teenagers decked out in skateboard attire mulling over the comic book racks. There’s a flock of college students swinging their bulging nylon knapsacks over their shoulders as they rummage in the used-paperback section. There’s an elderly couple scanning the new releases.

Ronnie starts down a random aisle, stops in the middle, picks up a paperback, and starts to thumb through it. After a minute, a skateboarder moves up next to her and starts paging through a fat anthology. He doesn’t appear to have much interest in the book. He keeps lifting his head and looking over his shoulder. The kid’s mulatto with a tight head of curly hair. He’s wearing a peach-colored T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. On the front is a cartoon of a skateboarder, suspended in the air, flying through a gap that’s been cut in a barbed-wire fence. Underneath the picture are the words Rupture the Linkage.

“I didn’t th-think you’d sh-show,” the kid stutters without looking at Ronnie.

She can’t help but smile at him.

“I’ll assume you’re Gabe,” she says.

He clenches his teeth and whispers, “You w-want to keep it d-down a little.”

Ronnie folds her arms across her chest and says, “What, is it bad form to be seen with an old broad?”

Gabe moves farther down the aisle and she looks around, then follows him.

“Hey, kid,” Ronnie says to his back, “you contacted me, remember?”

He turns around and gives a version of a solemn nod.

“First off,” she asks, “how’d you get my number? It’s unlisted.”

“Oh, p-please,” he says, as if she’s just told him a bad joke, then he smiles and says, “I can’t believe you c-c-came.”

“I wouldn’t have. I almost didn’t. You mentioned Flynn.”

He nods again and says, “We should p-probably keep moving, you know?”

Ronnie lets out a sigh. “Jesus, you people are bora paranoid. How old are you anyway?”

Gabe head-motions her toward a stairway. “C-c’mon,” he says, “I don’t think anyone’s in the b-b-basement.”

They descend a narrow black spiral staircase into a low-ceilinged cellar filled with rows of silver aluminum picnic tables. The tables are, in turn, lined with red plastic milk crates that hold runs of old magazines with names like Wonder Stories Quarterly and Astounding Science-Fiction. Gabe picks an aisle and starts halfheartedly flipping through the magazines. Ronnie moves next to him and does the same.

“You know, I don’t have all day,” she says.

“I really ap-appreciate that you came. I didn’t think you w-would.”

“What about Flynn? You said you had to tell me something about Flynn.”

Gabe seems torn, like he needs to talk and at the same time he’s bound not to. He takes a breath and blurts out, “Fl-Flynn isn’t the one hitting your station, l-lady, okay? It’s not him.”

Ronnie gives him a forced smile, shrugs, then mutters, “If you say so, kid—”

Gabe interrupts her and says, “L-look, there’s a lot of talk down W-W-W—”

“Wireless?” she says.

He nods quickly. “People s-say you were in there last night. People heard the voice, all right? They s-say you left with Flynn—”

“And what if I did?” She cuts him off with the same challenging finality that never fails on Libido Liveline.

Gabe moves his head side to side and stammers, “Look, if you’re trying to n-n-nail Flynn—”

“Who said that?”

She’s got him on the run. And he knows asking to meet her was a bad idea, that he should always clear everything, every goddamn move, through Hazel.

Ronnie lets him hang for just the right amount of time, then turns her body toward him and relaxes her posture a little. She allows a glance at the spiral staircase, lowers her voice, and says, “All right, now calm down. I just want to make a point with you here. You people, you jammers, you seem so sensitive about being judged the wrong way, about how the newspapers write about you, about your goddamn image …”

Gabe is staring up at her trying not to look nervous. Ronnie lets her voice soften a little more. “We meet for the first time, right? And you want me to just take it on faith, on your word, on this teenage-skateboard-punk word, right, that you’re all innocent of jamming QSG. That it’s the mythical O’Zebedee Brothers who’ve come back into town and attacked my station. Flynn’s got nothing to do with it. He can’t control these guys. Doesn’t even know who they are—”

“But that’s the tr-truth,” Gabe says, too loud.

“Quiet down,” Ronnie says. “Okay, let’s assume it is. Maybe I believe you. Maybe I believed it from Flynn and there was no need for you to even call me …”

She pauses, steps forward, and gives Gabe a soft push to the chest with her fingertips. He thinks she might be teasing him but there’s no smile on her face.

Her voice gets even lower and she says, “But you’re asking for a lot, kid. You’re asking that I believe the words of a bunch of strangers. And you’re asking that I believe these particular strangers never lie to each other.”

“What’s that s-supposed to mean?” Gabe asks.

“It means,” Ronnie says, “how the hell do you know that Flynn isn’t behind the jams? How do you know Flynn isn’t playing O’ZBON? He sure as hell has the equipment and the brains, right?”

“Oh, c-c’mon,” Gabe says, shaking his head.

“Yeah, fine,” Ronnie says, giving an annoyed smile. “You’re convinced. To doubt each other means the whole thing starts to fall apart. But this is what pisses me off, kid. Like I just said, maybe I really do believe Flynn. And beyond that, maybe I don’t care whether it’s him or not. No one’s jamming my show. Whoever it is keeps hitting Ray Todd, the station scumbag. I think it’s a riot, okay?”

“Then what’s the pr-problem?”

“The problem,” Ronnie says, “is that you’re all presumptuous bastards. You get hold of my phone number somehow. You call me up at the crack of dawn. You ask me to meet you here on Venus, right? And I show up like an idiot. And you want to ask me to lay off big daddy Flynn, the fat wallet behind the whole Wireless cult—”

“It’s not a ca-ca-cult.”

“Shut up for a second and let me finish. I understand. Flynn’s the center cog. Flynn’s the one you need to keep it going. He does all the favors. He wipes all the noses and gives all the pep talks. He’s the voice of reason. I can see it. He’s slick. I like the guy. A lot.”

She pauses for Gabe to say something. He seems to think for a second, to weigh something. Then he says, “You d-don’t know how it is. W-Wireless is deeper than you think, all right? It’s like, not everyone is at the sa-same level. There are different, I don’t know, sa-sa-circles. Different groups. Things are ch-changing. We’ve g-got … W-w-we …”

He seems to be having some problem choosing his words. “We’ve got d-d-different people supplying different info to different groups. There’s a lot of fighting right now, okay? There are these hackers who aren’t exactly inside yet. They keep spreading rumors. And no one knows for sure, but everyone feels like something b-big is coming at us.”

“The problem is,” Ronnie says, speaking slowly, “I don’t like you assuming I’m the enemy. For people so concerned with image, you’re pretty careless how you look at others—”

“Nobody na-knows I ca-called you. I da-did it myself. They’d be ba-ba-bullshit.”

“I don’t like you assuming I’m some sleazy errand boy who’d rat out you people for the employer. I don’t like you assuming I’d play up to Flynn just to find out his secrets and turn him in. I think it sucks. You don’t like the accusations coming your way, but you’ve got no problem asking me down here to call me a liar and a phony and an informer—”

“N-n-no. No wa-way. That wa-wasn’t—”

“You piss me off, you know that?”

“La-la-look, I da-didn’t ma-mean—”

“You’re over your goddamn head, junior. I’m the last person in the world you should get angry.”

“Pa-pa-please,” he says, and he sounds sufficiently contrite, so Ronnie stops and breathes and looks him up and down.

After an awkward minute, Gabe says, “I da-didn’t know what to do. Everybody’s so ta-tense. I didn’t want Fa-Fa-Fa …” and he trails off.

“Yes,” she prods.

Gabe shrugs. “I don’t want to la-lose Flynn,” he says, and turns back to the magazines.

Ronnie stares at him a second longer, then turns to the bin in front of her and slowly starts to flip through the old pulps.

“How old are you, Gabe?” she asks.

“Fa-Fa-Fifteen,” he says without looking up.

There’s a few seconds of silence, then Ronnie says, “I’m not some cop for QSG, I swear to you.”

Gabe nods and says, “And Fa-Flynn isn’t the one hitting the st-station.”

Ronnie raises her eyebrows and suddenly, without thinking, gives Gabe a playful punch on the arm.

“The thing is,” she says, “we both have to take it on faith.”

18

The Anarchy Museum was the brainchild of a Canal Zone artist and radio freak known only as Throttle who has since disappeared. It’s housed in what once passed for a workers’ lunch room on the second floor of Wireless. It’s in the rear of the building, partitioned from a storeroom loaded with liquor cases and broken radio housings that Ferrie can’t bear to part with. The Anarchy Museum was completely underwritten by G.T. Flynn.

The permanent exhibit is a half-finished mishmash. No one knows what Throttle’s final plan for the museum was and so it’s left in this half-completed state, waiting for his unlikely return. The room is filled with what the creator termed evidence of disorder, turmoil, lawlessness, and general chaos. The brick walls are hung with caricatures of terrorists, of both the political and the artistic kind. There are display cases filled with broken china soup tureens that contain the black ashes of the King James Bible, the compact edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, Robert’s Rules of Order, Black’s Law Dictionary, Hoyle’s Rules of Games, and A Layman’s Guide to F.C.C. Regulation, by Brink Johnson.

And there’s an enormous, spinnable Wheel of Chance mounted on a sidewall, a big wooden roulette-style wheel that makes that nervous ticking sound whenever anyone gives it a spin. Flynn paid a carnival barker a ridiculous sum of money for the thing, then scratched the roof of the Saab transporting it to the club.

These days, the jammers are the only ones who go into the museum. They’ve claimed it as an unofficial clubhouse. Lately the room has seen nothing but loud and spiteful feuding. Flynn thinks he can change that this morning. He’s whistling as he walks into the Anarchy Museum, carrying two dozen fresh Danish from the best bakery in town. He realizes he should bring a more sober tone to these proceedings, act semidour and contemplative. But he feels like he’s ten years younger and six inches taller. He’s wearing his favorite gray-pin double-breasted suit and the new Bally loafers. He spent the morning at the barber’s, then stopped by the florist on his way to the meeting. He had a dozen roses sent to Ronnie with a card that read: To Lulu, With Love, Sir Syd.

He thinks it’s possible his upbeat attitude could be helpful, that his general demeanor could be more harmonizing than any speech he could make. Isn’t it always best to lead by example? He could just let them all take in his mood, drink it up. He could get a firm arm around Wallace’s shoulder, another around Hazel’s, bear-hug them into understanding, walk them a full, bouncing circle around the museum like some choreographed trio from a forties movie—For Christ’s sake, people, look how sweet life can be. Twenty-four hours back, I’m busting my hump like everyone else, kissing surly ass and hawking policies no one wants to buy. And then, bang — the voice of my dreams takes me waltzing in the fog at the top of the city …

No, he can’t get too specific about things. He can’t actually tell about Ronnie. Not yet. The general mood is enough. It’s simple. Just let them know that joy is still possible in this life.

But now, looking at their faces, divided into two distinct sections on opposite sides of the room, he’s almost deflated. He picks out Wallace Browning’s face and their eyes meet. Wallace looks like a mess, his face gone a papery shade of gray, his eyes narrowed to veiny slits. But in classic Wallace fashion, he doesn’t want Olga’s accident discussed in public. So Flynn will abide by his wishes and not say a word in front of the others.

Flynn’s eyes appraise the rest of the sullen crowd. He wants to walk back outside, yell over his shoulder, I’m part of something else now. They’re both pathetic, he thinks. Both camps. Wallace and the old boys, chauvinists, know-it-alls, segregationists. And Hazel and her New Wave brats, cold, more and more humorless, superior in their imagined decadence. Does this always have to happen when a movement grows? When a family gets larger?

The museum is filled with smoke, cigars from Wallace and company, imported Gitanes, and maybe a joint or two from the kids. Ferrie and Most wouldn’t appreciate this. But Flynn won’t mention it. Why start things off more negative than they already are? In a sense, this is just another sales call, and the emphasis has to be upbeat. He has to keep his voice full of possibility and enjoyment. Unfortunately, Flynn’s coming down with the salesman’s worst enemy. He’s losing faith in his product. And he’s losing his ability to hide that fact.

There’s only one fallback when this happens: let the words take over. Just keep talking until something comes to you. Let your subconscious steer you toward a current you can’t yet see.

So Flynn brings his hands together in an air-snapping crack that’s made louder by the acoustics of the old factory and jolts both groups from their muttering daydreams.

“Okay,” he almost hollers, tossing his suit jacket over the arm of a bronze Madonna clothed in jungle fatigues. He’s all motion, kinetic energy. He loosens his tie and unfastens the collar button of his shirt, then starts to roll up his sleeves like an aggressive seminar leader about to kick off a weekend course in some new self-help discipline.

He picks a point midway between both groups, a show of impartiality. He puts his hands on his hips, turns his head slowly from side to side, letting the crowd think he’s surveying them, picking out faces and doing obscure calculations in his brain. He wishes he had a long-handled microphone to hold onto, make pointing motions with.

“First of all,” he starts, “I want to thank each one of you for agreeing to come here today. I know in some cases it meant missing work. And I think that just shows how committed we all feel to our little family here. And I use the word family.” He pauses, nods, raises his voice. “Family, that’s right. I see your faces. Some of you don’t like my terminology …”

He pivots on one foot, lets his body sway loosely from side to side, then actually turns his back on them, hoping he’s taking the right tack. He sucks in a huge pocket of air, then screams out, top of his lungs, “Well, tough shit.”

He comes back around, catches the shocked faces. He’s won at least some minimal ground, a momentary advantage. The thing now is to capitalize on it. They were all expecting Mr. Conciliatory, all appeasement and pleadings. He knew going in that the whole thing would be dead in five minutes if he came out soft and begged for compromise. He’s got to slap their faces and appeal strictly to the fear that brought them to Wireless in the first place, the chronic terror that they just don’t belong to something. He’s got to threaten them with breakdown, with the total dismantling of this thin subculture, make them flash on a previous life void of connections and a shared purpose.

And the first volley looks like it’s worked. Wallace’s gang looks white, like small pains are starting in their barreled chests and they all forgot their nitro medicine back at the house. Hazel’s clique suddenly seems younger, like stunned children blasted by the first stinging lick of a fire hose.

“You heard me.”

He lets his volume drop a bit. He’s learned from studying the cable preachers that continuous shouting loses its effectiveness within the first five minutes. “Every one of you heard me, goddamn it. I’m here today for one reason. To let off a little personal steam before I walk. You are all a bunch of spoiled goddamn little brats who should have your asses kicked red by the real world.

“You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that, regardless of your age”—a look to Wallace—“you really don’t have a clue what you’ve involved yourselves in here. It’s an old story, people. You don’t miss it till it’s gone. And then it’s too late. When I use the word family, I couldn’t be more exact in my thoughts. I use it after much thought. After sitting up alone all night in my office wondering what I can say to all of you, wondering how I can save something that I’ve given my heart and soul to, given all my goddamn faith to.”

Hazel opens her mouth to speak and he jumps over to her. “You shut up right now,” he yells. “This is my shot. When I leave, you bastards can bitch at each other all you want.”

He spots a visual aid next to Hazel, reaches down, and pulls Gabe up to his feet. The kid is about fifteen, sixteen years old, all birdlike hair and acne, awkward bones, embarrassed by his own presence.

Flynn throws an arm across Gabe’s shoulder. He can feel the boy shaking.

“Look here. Our newest family member. Well, we’ve set a fine example, haven’t we? We’ve just convinced this one how understanding and accepting we can be, right? How we take care of our own? How we work it out inside? Yeah, nice goddamn job. Should be real proud.”

He gives Gabe a shove back toward his seat and starts to pace between the two camps.

“You know, people, we weren’t the first jammers in the world”—again, a disappointed eye for Wallace, who flinches and stares down at the floor—“not by a long shot. And most likely, we won’t be the last. So maybe in some larger scheme of things, we just won’t matter that much. That’s probably the case. That’s the thing we all seem to fear, try to keep hidden. That’s the big goddamn secret, right? That in the end, we just don’t matter.

“I think every one of us ends up here for the same reason. Fine. Argue with me till one of us drops. My mind is made up. We all end up here because we’re lacking something. Because we want to belong to something. You know, you could jam in the privacy of your own home, down in your basement, up in your attic. Maybe you could get up on top of one of the big hills in your car. Stay mobile. But it doesn’t work out that way. We all end up here. ’Cause we want to be together. ’Cause whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we feel better when we’re with each other.

“Have you checked out how cold it is out there lately? Or have you been too busy fighting with each other? Huh? I’m going to say this once. Simple declarative sentence. It’s the only truth I know these days. So consider yourself warned. You don’t want to listen to me — the hell with you. You don’t care enough to save this thing — screw it. Let it fall apart. Here’s the sentence: All we’ve got is each other. There you go. You think differently, you’re nuts. I know the truth. You’ve all lost sight of the reasons you came here in the first place. And you’re going to pay for that unless you wake up fast.”

He pauses, looks down, puts hands in pockets, lets the voice start to come back just a hair toward friendly. “There is nothing here that can’t be worked out. There are no problems that cannot be mediated. I’m willing to be the middleman. I’m willing to be the sounding board. For God’s sake, use me.”

He looks up. They all know the speech is over, but no one knows what to say. He stares at the faces, egging them toward a comment, baiting them with a smirk that gives off more sadness than self-satisfaction. And that’s why he knows none of them will bite. He lets the silence build for a second before he pulls his jacket from the Madonna’s arm, then he raises his hand toward his head, gives something like a weary salute, and turns to the exit.

He gets about five steps and Hazel lets out, “Okay. All right. You’ve made your point.”

He turns, stares at her.

She shrugs and says, “So what now?”

“That’s not up to me,” he says, not wanting to cash in too early, almost believing in his own willingness to walk out the door.

“Let’s say we’re willing to agree to make an effort. To open some discussions and see where it leads.”

“That’s a start,” he says, giving some approval with a nod.

“I thought that’s what we came here for in the first place.”

It comes from Wallace. Flynn would have bet at the start that it would be Wallace, good old mentor, last of the old regime, the dwarf with the vision, who’d give him a problem.

Flynn rolls with it. He says, “Then let’s not waste any more time.”

He redeposits the jacket on the arm, and establishes a new position sitting down on an abandoned old RCA TV, a big cherry cabinet model. The picture tube has been removed and someone has built a diorama inside — a stunning scene of natural disaster, a mud slide drowning a tiny town.

Flynn folds his hands in his lap and tries for a second wind.

“Now, the way I see it is we’ve got two opposing philosophies. Let’s start off by agreeing that there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s healthy, good for the whole body. Keeps us on our toes, keeps the blood flowing through the brain. I think we have to look at this almost from an Eastern perspective. Yin and Yang. A balance. Personally, I don’t see a problem.”

He runs his hand through his hair, thinks for a second, and gives up a risky smile toward Hazel.

“The problem,” emphasizing the word, “comes when we start to translate a philosophy from the head to the street, so to speak. When words become actions. Which, correct me if I’m wrong here, is what Hazel and her people would like to do.”

He pauses to give a chance for objection.

“I think Hazel would like to see some evolution. We’ve spent some time at the bar together and I don’t think I’m out of line saying that she smells some stagnation within the family. And this bothers her a great deal since the reason she became involved at the start was for the charge, the rush, you know, the thrill of being on the other side of the fence. But I shouldn’t speak for her. I’m putting words in her mouth. Hazel, just tell me, tell us, if you could, okay, why you first wandered into Wireless.”

She’s not prepared and Flynn knows it. It disarms her a little and all she can do is take the question on, try for a straight-forward answer.

“Jesus, I don’t, uh—”

Flynn jumps into the breach. “Repeat what you said last week. Remember when we were talking last week? Back near the pool tables?”

“Well, I, uh—”

“She said, ‘I hooked up with you people ’cause I thought you knew the truth.’ Right, Hazel?”

She gives this confused nod.

“And I asked her what the truth was, ’cause let’s admit it, I’m a little dim sometimes. And she said, ‘You see that their idea of order is just an illusion—”

Hazel interrupts with, “I said ‘just bullshit.’ Their idea of order is just bullshit.”

“Okay, my mistake, like I said.” He taps his forehead with his index finger. “Now, Wallace—” he shifts his behind slightly on the set until he’s angled toward the old boys—“what I want to ask you is, is there anything about that statement you disagree with?”

Wallace is silent, sucking nervously on a fat stogie.

Flynn continues before the lack of a response can seem like a challenge.

“You, Wallace, my mentor, the guy who charted my course from day one, the guy who showed me how to take apart and put back together my first mail-away crystal set.”

He slides off the RCA, shuffles over to Wallace while nodding to himself, and places a hand on the dwarf’s shoulder while grinning over at Hazel.

In a lowered voice: “The man who once said to a very green prankster, ‘The problem is there’s no logic or order to anything and everyone wants you to believe that there is.’”

Pause.

“Do you remember saying that, Wallace? One spring night, about twenty years back, I’d run from Galilee for the tenth time. We met in an aisle at that old store on Hollis — University Radio. We got to talking. And you brought me back to DeForest Road. You and your wife, Olga, showed some kindness to a kid without a home. Had him to dinner. She served Swedish meatballs, Wallace. The radio was tuned to old WSTR all through the meal. You were wearing a maroon sweater vest. You remember any of that, Wallace? Because I do. I remember every second of that dinner. Of that whole night. ’Cause my life changed that night, my friend.”

He tries to be casual as he takes his hand from Wallace’s shoulder and starts his stroll across the room toward the opposite team. He comes to a stop in front of Hazel, extends his two hands palms-up. She flinches, looks quickly at the person next to her, and, not knowing what else to do, puts her hands in his. He continues to talk in the same deep, self-loving voice of a professional storyteller.

“That night, the wonderful Swedish meatball dinner, the spatzle, the coffee afterward, and your words, Wallace,” though he’s staring into Hazel’s eyes, “especially your words. That was what was going through my mind three years ago. Back on the day I found a young woman, a little scared, rabbity, outside in the parking lot, trying to figure out how to go inside, what to say to Tjun at the door. She was a runaway. Remember that, Hazel? Remember the dinner I got you down at the Rib Room? I do. You had the chili and three plates of soda bread just out of the oven. And milk. It was pouring that night. You remember sleeping on my couch? I played you some old Bob and Ray tapes? Right?”

He drops his hands, steps back, says to the crowd in general, “Anybody see a little pattern there? Huh?”

He goes back to the RCA and takes a seat.

“Okay,” in a semirelaxed voice, “here’s the problem. I don’t want to lose my family. Pretty simply put, right? I’m not going to debate ideology. I’m not interested enough. I want one thing. I want to hold on to my past”—a hand gestures to Wallace—“and my future”—open palm out toward Hazel.

“So, you tell me, folks. Somebody find the balls to tell me. How do I do that? How do I hold on to a family that doesn’t want to exist anymore? ’Cause I’m owed at least that. I’ve held up my end. If you were part of this place,” voice rising to a yell and hand slapping down on top of the TV, “I gave you anything you asked for. Money. Time. Advice. More than one of you called me after midnight for bail. More than one of you have keys to my car in your pockets right now. If you decided you belonged here, that was enough for me.

“So, somebody tell me how I make it last.”

He folds his arms across his chest and waits for a response.

Hazel takes a breath that everyone can hear and says, “Look, I’m not looking to break things up. It’s just that some of us feel it’s time to advance a little—”

“That means blowing up transmitters,” Wallace yells.

“Hey,” Flynn yells back, and points at him with his index finger like an annoyed traffic cop.

“You fucking hypocrite,” Hazel yells. “There’s not that big a jump between jamming the signal and dynamiting the tower.”

“What we do is a joke,” Wallace says, standing up. “It’s for amusement. It’s spirited mischievousness. What you want to do is terrorism.”

“Stop it now,” Flynn says, getting up to move between them.

“You’re a joker, all right, you little freak—”

“You’re street trash. I knew it the second I saw you—”

“Yeah, call the goddamn cops, you old fart. They’ll cuff us together—”

“This is not a political gang. Why don’t you and the rest of your uneducated ilk take your act down to South America and leave us—”

“What this group is or isn’t doesn’t get decided by you—”

“Dynamiting transmitters, vandalizing relay stations. This is ridiculous—”

Flynn stops the screaming with a reflex action, the only thing that occurs to him in the moment. He grabs a firecracker from his pants pocket, lights it behind his back, and tosses it onto the floor between them. The bang is given a boost by the size of the room. There’s a scream from both parties and Hazel and Wallace are left dazed and crouching near the ground, backs turned to each other.

Flynn sits impassively with his head cocked down near his left shoulder.

Ferrie comes running up the stairs, yelling, “What the hell’s the story?” in a cracked, high voice.

Flynn walks over to him, waving blue smoke out of his face. He claps Ferrie on the back, smiles, and says, “Just a little family argument. Nothing to worry about.”

19

Quinsigamond City Hall is a four-story rectangle of gray granite that stretches two hundred feet down the heart of Main Street. Its central entryway consists of an enclosed portico carved into an arch and capped by a two-hundred-foot Florentine tower that houses a huge and ornate eye-of-God clock and culminates in an open-air balcony.

Hannah stands on the first step of the enormous curving baroque staircase that leads to the City Council chambers. It’s noon, but the street is practically deserted. In the glare that breaks through the cloud cover, Hannah can make out the enormous marble eagle that perches on the knob of the balcony’s roof as if watching over the city. She can remember her father bringing her to City Hall when she was young, maybe to pay a tax bill, maybe to get a birth certificate. When they exited the building, he turned his daughter around and began to point things out — the red tile of the hip roof, the fanged gargoyles carved into the granite at each corner. He pointed out the balcony and began the story of Isaiah Timmons or Tomkins — what the hell was his name? — the first printer in America, how he stood on that balcony in July of 1776 and screamed out the Declaration of Independence for the crowd gathered below. But Hannah couldn’t concentrate on the story of the rebel printer. Instead, she stared at the carved eagle at the top of the building, impressed by how lifelike it looked, and beyond that, how frightening it seemed, not really like an eagle at all, but more like a vulture, a bird of prey. It seemed as if the bird were perpetually looking out over the city for a new victim, an easy mark, a fresh carcass to swoop down on and cleave meat from bone.

And now, looking up at the marble bird almost twenty years later, Hannah still has this feeling. So she zips up her jacket and runs up the curve of the stairs.

Inside, the building is all quartered oak and mahogany. The ceilings are ridiculously high and the halls are lined with oversized oil portraits of the long line of Quinsigamond’s mayors, each framed in heavy gilt. She wonders if this environment has any effect on the people who work in the city’s offices each day. Would it give you a constant sense of history, of the progression of events that have shaped your home? Or do you quickly become immune to the out-of-date grandeur? Or is there another possible effect, a subconscious depression that results in watching decay chew on this structure with unbearable patience and persistence day after day?

The City Council chambers are on the third floor. Hannah opens a rear door and takes a seat on the last wooden bench just as Mayor Welby begins to call the meeting to order. It’s not the normal time for a council meeting. The mayor’s office announced the session yesterday morning with a brief press release sent to the Spy. It was a short statement informing “all concerned parties” that the matter of “unlicensed radio disruptions” would be addressed at an unscheduled session. Hannah, like the rest of the department, saw it as a grandstand play to appease the station owners and she had little intention of even reading the Spy’s coverage, let alone attending, until she got the message on her answering machine.

She can’t imagine why G.T. Flynn would ask to meet her here. But she knows Flynn was connected to Lenore and that’s enough to bring her downtown.

The room is packed. Welby is in position behind his raised walnut desk, something like a judge’s bench, which makes him tower over the city manager and the rest of the council. Though she doesn’t make a hobby of studying local politics, Hannah has a native’s grasp of the back-room alliances and infighting. Welby has Counselors Krieger and Lotman on his side and in his pocket respectively. Donaghue, Pfeil, and Campana line up with City Manager Kenner. And, at the moment anyway, the rest — Frye, Searle, Altier, Jardine, and Kurahashi — are in perpetual motion, always playing one side off the other, cutting deals and bartering votes as if the business of running the city were a never-ending swap meet.

The local cable access station has two television cameras mounted on small parapets at opposite sides of the chamber. The camera crew look like scruffy kids, fooling with their headsets and cranking knobs below their monitors, testing the focus on each of the councillors, who all seem to be leaning dangerously back in their seats and simultaneously using a hand to blanket their microphones as they whisper to their neighbors and make odd, squinty expressions.

Someone touches Hannah’s shoulder and she flinches and turns to see a dark-haired guy who she’d nail at about thirty-five years, 165 pounds, maybe five eleven, with no visible facial markings.

It’s G.T. Flynn. He’s dressed in a deep gray double-breasted suit with a starched white shirt and a red-patterned tie knotted so tight at the neck that Hannah thinks he should be gasping. But gasping, she knows, is not Flynn’s style.

She met him once before, about two years back. She was having lunch with Lenore at the Rib Room down in the Zone. Flynn slid into their booth with a run of smooth greetings and Hannah almost choked on her chicken salad to see Lenore actually stammer back her response. She thinks he was dropping off some insurance papers, maybe a life policy — she vaguely remembers some mention of Lenore’s brother, Ike, as a beneficiary. Then he was gone, his exit as slick and abrupt as his entrance. It wasn’t until they’d paid the check and were back on Rimbaud Way that Hannah asked her partner about Flynn.

Lenore said, “He’s just a guy I know,” in that definitive tone that sealed the topic forever. G.T. Flynn was never brought up again.

Now, he smiles and eye-motions for Hannah to slide in. She does and he takes a seat next to her, squeezed in, their thighs touching.

He leans back to her ear and says, “Thanks for coming,” then sits forward and turns his attention to the meeting.

Hannah’s not sure what to do. She has no desire to sit through a boring council meeting in order to find out what this guy wants. But there’s a feeling that she may have to play things his way to satisfy her curiosity. She decides to sit back for ten minutes and see what develops.

Reverend Cotton of the Episcopal Church has his bald head bowed and his eyes squeezed shut and his hands clasped to his chest as he stands before the speaker’s microphone and intones an invocation. The majority of the councillors look respectfully bored, except for Yuko Kurahashi. She’s hunched over the conference table making notes on a legal pad, clearly annoyed with the traditional prayer that Welby refuses to eliminate despite her threats of court action.

The audience gathered on the benches behind a partitioning guardrail seems anxious to get things rolling. There are more suits and ties in the crowd than normal, but then, Hannah reminds herself, this isn’t a normal meeting. These must be the station owners and managers, waiting to hear what the city is going to do to protect their interests.

As if on cue, Mayor Welby bends the accordion stem of his microphone until his lips almost touch the surface. He looks out over the council and the audience, then, ever the pro, locks his eyes on the TV camera with the red light on top, takes a deep breath, and says, in his slightly nasal but still-powerful baritone, “My fellow councillors, City Manager Kenner, our in-chamber audience, and all our city’s taxpayers, I thank you for joining us tonight on such short notice. I’ve asked you all here to address the recent onslaught of the unlicensed and illegal disruption, or jamming, to use the current terminology, that has plagued many of our local radio broadcasters.”

He pauses and picks his bifocals up off his desktop, slides them onto the tip of his nose, picks up a sheet of paper, and reads, in a more halting tone, “First and foremost, I want to assure everyone watching tonight that the Mayor’s Office and the City Council and the local law enforcement agencies have been actively pursuing any and all avenues to end these disruptions, and any statement to the contrary is both untrue and provocative.”

He drops the paper and takes a second to glower down at the audience. Hannah knows this is a reply to charges in yesterday’s Spy that Welby was taking the jamming incidents lightly. Charles Federman, the owner of WQSG, had gone so far as to call Welby a “bought and paid-for hack.”

Welby pulls his glasses off and seems to toss them down, emphasizing his annoyance. His voice raises slightly. “I want it made absolutely clear, right here and now, that my office will not tolerate this behavior. I’ve been in daily contact with Chief Bendix and the unit he’s assigned to investigate these incidents. We’ve requested the necessary equipment needed to track the broadcasts and we’re waiting to coordinate with an agent from the FCC.”

The voice gets just a bit louder, more belligerent. “And if the private sector has any suggestions for further action, we welcome them with open ears.”

Flynn leans into Hannah’s side and whispers, “Here we go.”

She turns to look at him but he’s riveted on the speaker’s microphone as a tall, bulky man with enormous shoulders walks to it. The guy’s got a head of gray stubble and his face is shaved military-close to reveal red, almost-scarlet cheeks beneath a Nixonesque nose lined with a deep purple web of veins. He’s wearing a navy suit and a maroon silk tie. And though he has the immediate bearing of a man who’s never been infected with self-doubt, his forehead is gleaming with a wash of sweat.

He stands as if a steel pole has been attached to his spine, his hands clasped together behind his back, his legs spread slightly apart. He begins his oration as if in midspeech, voice already booming, making the sound system ring now and then.

“Our mayor has the standard politician’s talent for soliloquy. But this is real life, not the debate club, and every day that goes by costs me money and the confidence of my advertisers. And I simply do not understand why this should be such a problem. Mr. Mayor, Councillors, you have a suspicious fire, you round up known arsonists. You have unlicensed radio transmissions, you round up the radio freaks. Is there an error in my thinking that you could point out to me, Mayor Welby?”

The bulk of the audience bursts out in spontaneous applause, fellow station owners, normally competitors, tonight ready to back their unofficial spokesman, Charles Federman.

Welby begins to bash away at his desktop with his gavel, saying, “I’d ask the viewing audience to control itself, please.”

He says the word please like every harried schoolteacher Hannah has ever known. And it dawns on her, the way it must have just dawned on the mayor, that though he called this meeting to defuse an image problem, he could end up more sullied than vindicated. Charles Federman isn’t Louis Lotman, cowed with a fast, harsh word or the threat of a review board. Federman is the real thing, a business animal with an instinct for determining weakness and manipulating image. Welby is going to have to scramble to turn this thing around.

And he does exactly the right thing. He dilutes the blame hanging in the air by calling up Chief Bendix and asking, with a bureaucrat’s practiced weariness, to explain to the loud but ill-informed Mr. Federman the definition of “probable cause” and the difficulty of warrant attainment.

As the chief starts to speak in a raspy drone, Flynn slouches down a bit and says softly, “Do you remember me? We met down the Zone once? You were with Lenore Thomas.”

Hannah says, “I remember you,” in a noncommittal voice and continues to look at Bendix’s neck as it bulges against his shirt collar.

“I was wondering,” Flynn says, then hesitates and Hannah reads it as calculated. He swallows and starts again, “I was curious if you ever hear from Lenore anymore?”

She turns and gives him a look that she hopes says, Cut the shit, pal.

“Lenore moved away,” she says. “As far as I know, she’s never been back to the city.”

“Not even to see her brother?”

Hannah’s annoyed at the question. She says, “Why don’t you ask Ike?”

Flynn nods, rubs a hand over his jaw, changes direction. “Look,” he says, “I’m sorry if it was inconvenient for you to come down here. I didn’t want to miss this meeting and I thought this might be a good place to get together.”

“Nice and public,” Hannah says. “Neutral territory.”

His voice drops to a whisper. “Look, I don’t know what you thought I—”

She interrupts, “You look, pal. I don’t know what was between you and Lenore. But number one, I haven’t heard from her. You want to get a message to her, you’ll have to find someone else. And number two, I’ll decide who I share information with—”

Now he interrupts, looking down at the bench beyond her as he speaks through semiclenched teeth. “Hey, Officer, I didn’t come here to antagonize you, all right? I thought there might be some way we could help each other. There might be a few things we have in common.”

Get up and leave, Hannah thinks. Just get up and slide past him and go out the door. But instinct keeps her seated. That and the mention of Lenore. Everything keeps coming back to Lenore. It’s like a bad Frankenstein movie: Lenore, the head-case scientist. And Hannah, the misunderstood monster. But there’s a twist to this new version of the story. Lenore didn’t take her body parts from fresh graves. She supplied them herself. So, of course, the project was doomed from the start. The more of herself that Lenore gave away, the more Lenore disappeared. And when the creator did finally, literally vanish, the creation was left incomplete.

* * *

Down on the chamber floor, Bendix is relinquishing the public microphone to a walleyed little man who identifies himself as “Dr. Pasqual DeMango, tenured professor of postmodern performance arts at St. Ignatius College.”

The guy is dressed in this antique forest-green suede sports coat with deep green leather elbow patches, a heavy, thick-ribbed, cherry-red turtleneck sweater, black wool pants, and unlaced Keds high-top sneakers. He has a broad nose that dominates his face and a shock of jet-black wiry hair that shoots over the top of his head and plunges down the opposite slope like a frozen wave.

He touches the microphone hesitantly, as if testing to see if he’ll get a shock, but before he can speak, the mayor’s assistant, Mrs. Gilbert, rises to the mayor’s mike and announces that since the professor did not sign in with her prior to the invocation, the rules of the council will not allow for his address. A wave of audible dissension spreads through the room and immediately the city manager, Maud Kenner, starts to make a statement, without the benefit of her mike, about “high-handed nonsense,” and someone else, Hannah can’t tell who, calls out for a suspension of the rules.

And Welby goes into his gavel-banging mode.

Flynn touches Hannah’s arm.

“Lenore and I had a mutual friend,” he says.

Hannah gives him a shrug.

“A girl, a young woman, excuse me. Hung around the Canal Zone. Hung with the punks down Rimbaud.”

“She have a name?” Hannah asks.

“Her name’s Hazel,” Flynn says. “You know her?”

“Oh yeah,” Hannah says, shaking her head and smiling. “I know Hazel.”

Flynn takes a breath and says, “Lenore used to sort of check up on Hazel for me. You know what I’m saying? She used to keep me informed.”

Hannah looks him in the eye and says, “And what did you do for Lenore?”

There’s a long moment as they stare at each other until Flynn decides it’s a standoff and says, “I took care of her business affairs. That’s what I do for a living.”

The council votes to allow DeMango to speak and the audience again begins to applaud, but their clapping dies out immediately as the professor, without any preamble, launches into a tirade against “a tyrannical and oppressive licensing system” and “the monopoly of the sound waves by fascist radio barons.”

The radio people in the audience switch at once to a chorus of booing and catcalls as DeMango shakes a fist toward them and yells that the jamming incidents “represent a new and barely explored art form, and as such, should be given all possible tolerance.”

At this suggestion, Charles Federman rises to his feet and begins calling for the microphone. DeMango pivots away from the council to face down Federman and screams, “To deny the new frequency poets their voice, to silence the visionary fever of this new wave of artists and thinkers, is tantamount to denying our cultural future.”

Welby signals for the council police and DeMango grasps the microphone with both hands and rants, “You don’t understand. This is a cutting-edge art form. Your attempts to infiltrate and crush the jammers are a walk down the road to barbarism and stagnation and—”

The rest of his words go unheard as two officers pull him away from the mike and lead him, twisting and jerking, out of the chambers. Federman then grabs the mike, turns to Welby, and calls him a “monkey-boy with a pension.” The chamber erupts with angry voices trying to yell over one another. And then the whole room is blasted by screeching feedback that seems to be coming from the cable TV equipment. The cable technicians tear their headsets off and cover their ears with their hands. Welby is up out of his seat, yelling at Bendix to get some cops in here. Maud Kenner is pounding on the council table with a flat palm.

Someone uncouples two electrical cables and the feedback ends. But the yelling and cursing continue. Federman’s mouth is outlined with spittle. He’s screaming, “Let go of me, Vinnie,” to a small, round assistant who’s trying to restrain him. Everyone’s out of their seats and Hannah thinks punches could be thrown at any second.

Flynn says, “You want to get out of here?” and Hannah nods and follows him out of the chamber.

They don’t talk till they’re out on Main Street, standing in the shadow thrown by City Hall.

Flynn is lightly touching his left ear with his index finger.

“Jesus,” he says, “I’m sorry I asked you down here.”

Hannah ignores the apology. She’s not sure what to feel about this guy and wonders how much that has to do with his connection to Lenore.

“Really, I’m sorry about this,” Flynn says again, seeming genuinely flustered. “Would you like to go get a—”

Hannah cuts him off with a shake of her head. She starts to walk backward in the direction of her Mustang. After a couple steps she pauses and says, “I’ll check up on Hazel. I’ll call you in a couple days.”

Flynn seems to be unsure what to say. After a few seconds he says, “Okay, I’m in the book.”

She looks him up and down, from the pricy haircut to the imported loafers. And suddenly she’s wondering if Lenore slept with this guy, and if maybe he was that one concealed, unspoken lover that she let her guard down for.

“I’m sure I can find you,” Hannah says, then turns and starts to walk.

She knows he’s still standing there, looking at her back, watching her walk. Or maybe she’s feeling the eyes of the big marble vulture, resting up on the roof of City Hall, nested and waiting above Quinsigamond, looking down at her and sizing up an abundant meal of surprisingly tender meat.

20

Ten miles outside of Quinsigamond, on a two-lane stretch on the outskirts of Whitney, Flynn pulls the Saab over onto the shoulder of the road and kills the engine.

Ronnie looks at him for a second, then says, “Well, Scooter, if you want to go parking don’t you think we could get a more secluded spot?”

Flynn stares out of the window and says, “Pop the glove box.”

“You used to love it when I was a wise-ass. You want a map or something?”

“Binoculars,” Flynn says.

She reaches in and underneath a pile of small transistor radios, she touches a miniature pair of rubber sports binoculars. She pulls them out. They’re army green and have a brand name, German she thinks, written on the side. She hands them over and Flynn grabs them and brings them up to his eyes without a word.

“A voyeur,” she says. “Great. I’m an expert at this.”

He hands the glasses over to her and says, “Take a look.”

She puts her eyes to the rubber cups, focuses, takes in a large, weathered-shingle farmhouse. The building is three stories high, a mishmash of modified Victorian and French country styles. There’s a wraparound porch moating the front entrance and an attached barn off the back. The whole thing sits a good fifty yards back from the road, at the foot of a rising knoll. Planted in a side yard are volleyball nets and mounted on the barn below the hayloft door is a basketball backboard and hoop.

“The third floor is all open,” Flynn says.

Ronnie continues to survey the property without responding.

“Like this big loft area. All unpartitioned. At least that’s how it was, you know, twenty years ago.”

He shifts in his seat. “They had two dozen steel-frame bunk beds. They were set up in rows. Like an army barracks. You had a locker that went underneath. You’d keep all your stuff in there. We’d be lined up alphabetically. We’d do everything alphabetically. Brush our teeth. Line up in the kitchen. Get in the bus. They used to park the bus in the barn. Can you see it?”

She tries to peer into the barn. The double doors are open, but the position of the sun makes it impossible to see anything inside. She shakes her head.

“They probably got rid of it. The thing was dying twenty year ago. This old Harvester monster. Sister Marietta’s true love. She was a wizard, drove it like a goddamn tank. Always ready for battle.”

Ronnie finally brings the glasses down. “This is where you grew up,” she says in a flat, quiet voice.

“This is the place,” Flynn says.

Ronnie thinks for a minute, then says, “Do you want to go in?”

He turns his head sideways toward her and squints his eyes like he’s in pain. “Are you kidding?”

“Do you drive out here a lot?”

“Not a lot. I mean, what does a lot mean?”

“And you never go in?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Do you stay in touch with anyone? Like any of the boys you knew here?”

He gives a slight shake of the head.

“So, why are we here?” she asks.

He opens his mouth, closes it, shrugs.

“You’re a fountain of self-knowledge,” she says.

He likes this. The easy tease, the playfulness. The throw-away intimacy. He wants to give it back and wishes he were as good at it.

He lets his head fall back onto the rest, keeping his eyes on the farmhouse. “It’s a ploy,” he says, “I bring all my dates out here. Women are nuts for orphans. Brings out all kinds of sympathies.”

“I knew it,” Ronnie says. “You reek of ulterior motive.”

“Comes in a little bottle. Imported from Europe. Costs me a fortune. It’s made from the spleens of just-dead lawyers.”

“What about just-dead financial planners?”

“Nothing ulterior about our motives. We’re right up front. Sign the check and try not to worry.”

She smiles and nods, holds in the laugh. Then she changes the tone of her voice and says, “So, why are we here, Flynn?”

“Jesus, you’re good at that,” he says. “You could make some coin off that voice.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“I don’t know. I just keep coming back.”

“You know. Do you send money to this place?”

“Almost never.”

“Almost never?”

“I’m like that with money. I’ve got to beat myself up just to keep from dialing in to the TV preachers with my credit cards.”

“Did they abuse you here?”

He makes a face. “It wasn’t like that. I got hit in the head with a Bible once. Can’t remember what for. Nun came up-stairs before bed to apologize.”

“Did you let her off the hook?”

“After I sold her a whole life policy.”

“And got put on retainer to manage the sisters’ savings account. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“There you go,” Flynn says. “You’re on to me.”

“No, but I’m working on it.”

“I’m clear water, Ronnie. You can see right through me. There’s not much here, I swear to God.”

“Maybe you’re not the best judge.”

“Maybe there’s no big mystery.”

“Maybe there’s a bunch of little ones. Like why you drive out here. Like why the yuppie biz-master hangs out with radio criminals.”

“They’re not criminals, Ronnie.” An edge comes up in his voice.

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry, Flynn, but technically they are. It’s a crime to jam licensed radio broadcasts—”

“And where I sit, it’s a goddamn crime that some scumbag racist hatemonger like Ray Todd can fill the airwaves with fascist bullshit—”

“Go buy some licensing, Flynn. Go buy the station. Then pull Todd and pump your own grudges out at the public. That’s the way it works. That’s the system we’ve got.”

“And if I don’t like this particular system?”

“Seems to work well enough when you’re hustling life policies and mutual funds.”

“I provide a service, Ronnie. I don’t put a gun to anyone’s head—”

“And there’s an off switch on every radio, Flynn. No one makes people listen to Ray Todd.”

“There are reasons I do what I do—”

“Right,” she says, indicating the farmhouse with a tilt of her head. “But you don’t seem to know what they are.”

He stops himself from blurting a comeback, waits a beat, then says, “Okay, maybe I’m just one more confused guy.”

“And maybe you just don’t trust me completely,” Ronnie says. “Not yet. And maybe that’s a smart move at this point. I can tell already, I’m more instinctual than you—”

“That right?”

“—and I think, maybe, you’re sitting in the middle of this awful paradox. And I think you tie yourself up in knots trying to make things logical.”

“Paradox?”

“Yeah,” Ronnie says. “I think maybe you’ve found that, through no fault of your own, by some quirk of nature, okay, the orphan boy moved pretty easily into the heart of the system. He ended up looking the part. The language came easy. He wore clothes well. He had a weird knack for sales and for saying the right words at the right time. He discovered this genius for subliminal manipulation.”

“This is me, now, right? This is beautiful—”

“But the lousy thing was — the more Flynn moved into the heart of the system, the more he hated it. So here’s the paradox. He stayed there and made good money off this system to finance the people who couldn’t fit in. And who wanted to tear it down.”

“You think I’m a man of huge responsibilities.”

“You know why you hate Ray Todd so much—”

“Who says I hate Ray Todd?”

“It’s because people with brains like Ray Todd are absolutely convinced they know what’s best. Not only for themselves but for you. And they want to enact the knowledge. They want to make it as unconditional as nature. That’s the heart of fascism, G.T. And what you can’t stand, whether you know it or not, what you can’t bear, is the fact that it’s sleeping, to some degree, inside every one of us. It’s like as a kid, you never figured that out. Or if you did, you just blocked it out completely.”

“That’s your take on human nature?” Flynn says. “Were your parents this cynical? Does this run in the genes?”

“I think maybe you come out here ’cause the nuns told you life was different. That if you cut into the human heart you’ll find a sleeping Jesus. Not a sleeping fascist. And you want to figure out why they lied to you. And you sit in the car and never go up to the door ’cause you can’t stand to finally give up their version.”

He doesn’t know what to say and this bothers him because he knows that not speaking, not returning a quick rebuttal, validates what she’s said. The car goes silent for a long awkward minute and when he does finally find his voice, it comes out different. There’s no edge and no rhythm, no shading of an angry humor. And no sarcasm whatsoever.

He says, “I wish I could take you through that house.”

More silence, and then, “There’s this old dirt-floor cellar. Classic New England cellar. Mortared rough-stone foundation. Hottest day of summer, that place used to be cool as October.”

There’s a pause. He rubs his hand at his neck, touches his Adam’s apple.

“Most of the others hated the cellar. It was dark. Musty. Shadows everywhere. But I loved it. I loved exactly those things. And way in the back, in the deepest corner of the cellar, was this little shaft area. I don’t know, it might have originally been a potato bin or something. But when I was there it was filled with scrap wood. Just random pieces of plank and beams and I remember there was some hacked-up barn board. It was just this big pile of wood. Sat about four feet high. When it rained, when it really poured, the cellar would take in water. You ever smell wet wood? You know that smell? I’ll never forget that smell.”

He puts his hands on the steering wheel, the classic driving-school grip.

“I used to be missing a lot. The nuns would have something going on and they could never find me. By suppertime I’d show up. To this day no one ever knew where I was hiding. Drove them nuts. Maybe that’s why I got hit with the Bible that time.”

She watches his hands tighten slightly on the wheel.

“Probably not,” he says.

“You were in the wood shaft,” Ronnie says, flinching at her own voice.

He nods.

“I was in the wood shaft. I was in that little bin. Every time. I was sitting on top of the pile of wood. Really down in it. Kind of blanketed with scrap wood. It’d be covering my legs.”

She gives him a few seconds to go on and when he doesn’t, she pushes. “Why were you there?”

“I just wanted to be there. I just wanted to be alone. In the dark.”

“What would you do?”

“I’d just sit. And then I’d listen to my own breath. And then I’d catch myself praying.”

“Praying?”

“Act of Contrition.” His voice breaks a little. She can hear stress in the short phrasing. Something’s happening in his throat.

“You thought you’d done something wrong?”

“I must have. To be there. To have no one.”

She brings her hand up to the side of his face, touches his cheek, and lets her fingers go into the hair above his ears. She’s acting on instinct. She doesn’t know what to say.

“That was a long time ago, Flynn,” she tries.

His hand goes from the steering wheel to the shift. He pops the car into gear, lets out a staggered breath, and whispers, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

21

Hazel is walking south on Rimbaud headed for the Rib Room. Hannah lets the Mustang hang a good two car lengths back, keeps her foot off the gas, and pulls to the curb whenever a car comes into the rearview. She takes a full block to study Hazel’s walk and decides the girl has a genuine confidence, something innate, beyond a cultivated act. Beyond the sarcastic and impatient lip she uses on all her camp followers.

As they approach the diner, Hannah finds an open meter and parks. She has to jog to reach Hazel before she enters the Rib Room, but she manages to come up. beside her and link their arms, just one more pair of lesbian artist punks out for coffee and small talk on a beautiful fall day.

Hazel freezes in place, gives away nothing in the second it takes her to get clear on who’s latched onto her arm. Then her eyes tighten and her teeth clench and Hannah can almost hear her brain grinding for the most vicious greeting on file.

Hannah beats her to the punch, leans in and kisses her on the cheek with a rough, wet move, nods her head and puts on a mock smile and says, “Honey, why won’t you return my calls?”

Hazel looks over her shoulder to the street and says, “You’ve just gotten too old for me, you narco bitch. You’re really starting to look like that hag you used to hang with.”

Hannah grabs some flesh between her thumb and forefinger, gives a pinch and a bruise that will be purple for weeks, and reaches with her free hand for the door. “You’ll never change, you little brat. Let’s have some espresso. You can show me your new tattoos.”

Technically, the Rib Room does not serve lunch. The doors do not officially open until five. But for the past few years, Elmore Orsi has been brewing coffee for the select few who know enough to ignore the pulled shades and Closed sign. Usually a half dozen hung-over regulars will huddle in booths and silently browse the morning edition of the Spy until the aspirin kicks in and they can stand the thought of heading back out to the studios and clubs.

Hannah marches Hazel down the center aisle, holding her close, even at one point, as they pass Elmore at the cashier’s station, pressing her head against Hazel’s shoulder. Orsi gives a confused half-laugh, half-cough, and Hannah slides Hazel into a rear booth, then moves in on the same side.

“Jesus, have you gotten pushy,” Hazel says, moving away from Hannah, leaning her back against the wall until she’s sideways in the booth.

“I’ve been hearing the same thing about you, love,” Hannah says, shrugging out of her suede jacket, exposing her holster and her Magnum.

“You wanted to talk to me, you could’ve just called.”

Hannah gives her a long look through squinted eyes. “You don’t have a goddamn residence, Hazel. You live out of a freaking car half the time.”

Hazel looks down the aisle to Elmore, motions with her head, and says, “You could’ve called here.”

Hannah reaches past her and takes a plastic menu from a metal-pronged salt and pepper holder.

“What happened to Wireless?” she asks. “They’re not taking your calls anymore? You and the radio freaks have a falling-out?”

Before Hazel can answer, Hannah yells out, too loud, “Can we get two coffees down here, please?”

Hazel rubs a hand hard over her left eye, which Hannah gets a kick out of.

“What is it in me,” Hannah says, pretending to study the menu, “that gets such a big kick out of embarrassing you in front of the ultra-hip?”

Hazel doesn’t say a word, just gives a bored, unblinking stare. Elmore comes down the aisle carrying two huge white porcelain mugs and a mini silver creamer, all atop a Day-Gloorange serving tray. He holds the tray up on his fingertips, higher than his shoulders, performing, indulging Hannah with a mime’s rendition of stiff, four-star service. He places the mugs in front of the women, positions the creamer between them, adjusts a bar towel over a rigid arm, and gives a solemn, theatrical waist-bow.

Hannah pushes the cream away and says, “You got to love that guy. He could charm the wallet off a dead man.”

She takes a sip of the steaming coffee and adds, “So what’s good in here? I haven’t had Orsi’s cooking in ages.”

Hazel knows Hannah could hold out all day, keep her penned in the booth and numb her with hours of insulting small talk. So, she breaks easy, gives Hannah her full attention, and says, “Okay, what did I do?”

Hannah matches her new serious tone and says, “You tell me, little sister.”

“I’m not your sister, Hannah. I honestly don’t know what the Christ you want. Why don’t you tell me and we can both get on with the day.”

“Why don’t you relax?” Hannah says, her voice slowing down and lowering to a level that makes Hazel buck a little. “If I want to sit here with you from now until summer, honey, that’s exactly what we’ll fucking do. And if I want to talk about goddamn makeup tips, that’s exactly what we’ll fucking discuss.”

She reaches over, puts a hand on Hazel’s leg just above the kneecap, and gives a long, hard squeeze. Hazel stays silent and motionless, but an ache starts up, not in her leg, but at the very back of her throat, a childhood kind of burning ache, more a prelude to tears than pain. Finally, she blinks a few times, looks into Hannah’s eyes, and nods slightly.

Hannah lets go of her leg and shifts herself closer to Hazel. She starts to talk in a whisper, so intense and heavy with breath that Hazel starts to think she’s going to draw the gun and pull back the hammer.

Instead she says, “Don’t you ever, ever give me any attitude, Hazel.”

Hazel nods again.

Hannah’s nostrils expand as she exhales and she repeats, “I mean fucking never.”

Hazel’s nod increases in speed and Hannah continues.

“I’ve been hearing that you’ve been growing some balls since the last time we spoke. And that’s fine. That’s great. I kind of get a kick out of it, the thought of you putting some fear into the dorkwhites down here in the Zone. You want to terrorize your radio dinks, I think it’s a riot.”

She picks up Hazel’s mug and takes a sip.

“But you never forget, from now till the day you fucking die, sister, that it was Lenore who hauled your seventeen-year-old ass out of Bangkok Park—”

“I didn’t forget,” Hazel starts, but Hannah cuts her off.

“Don’t interrupt me. This is a story I like and one you seem to need to hear on a regular basis. You were one more little shithead with stupid parents who took a bus east and came into my fucking city. And that two-bit Cuban pimp, that greasy little Cardona, he was all ready to spike your little ass full of smack and add you to his stable. And for reasons that to this goddamn day I don’t understand, Lenore Thomas stepped in.”

“I know she did, Hannah—”

“Shut the hell up. A dozen little brats like you immigrate to Bangkok every goddamn week. It’s not our job or habit to intervene. It costs favors and it’s usually a useless, pathetic act. It’s futile and everyone who knows me knows I hate futility.”

Hannah looks away for a second, lifts her head to see Elmore staring at them from behind his register.

Hannah explodes. “Hey, Orsi, you old Italian fuck,” she screams, “when’s the last time the health board went through this dump?”

The Rib Room falls to absolute silence and Elmore turns on his heels and disappears into the storeroom.

Hannah waits a beat for the room to fall back to some degree of background noise, then continues.

“Lenore saw something in you, Hazel. Now, I’ve got no idea what it was. But she pulled you out of the Park before any damage was done. And she gave your name to her friend Flynn and told him to watch out for you in the Zone.”

Hannah picks up Hazel’s mug, sips, motions in a circle with it. “She hoped you’d do better than this. She hoped this would be a kind of way station while you grew up a little and figured out what you wanted to do.” She pauses and says, “How old are you now, Hazel?”

Hazel has to gulp to lubricate her throat. “Twenty-three.”

“Twenty-three,” Hannah repeats.

They sit in silence for a few seconds, then Hannah says, “I know you do Elmore’s books, Hazel. And I know you’re good at it.”

Hazel lets out a quivering, audible sigh, like a warning sign to a perpetual quarrel, a never-ending row with a disappointed parent, a frustrated mother who’ll never understand an infinite number of facts.

“I don’t understand why you still live this way, Hazel.”

“It’s my life, Detective,” Hazel says, staring at the table.

“I don’t see why you don’t get a decent place to live. I know Flynn would help you. He helped Lenore and her brother when their parents kicked. He’s good at his job, despite the radio shit.”

“Please,” Hazel says in a whisper, but Hannah keeps pushing.

“I don’t get you. Why don’t you buy some decent clothes? Why don’t you grow up?”

The last question pushes Hazel over the limit and she finds some volume of her own and says, “It’s my fucking life,” suddenly unconcerned about the consequences of her outburst.

They stare at each other, both wondering if it’s going to get physical, if punches will be thrown and steaming coffee tossed. But Hannah defuses the moment by bringing her hands together in a half dozen claps of applause.

“Still some piss left in the girl from Kansas, huh?” Hannah says. She pauses, drains the last of Hazel’s coffee, pulls her own mug in front of her, and says, “Why don’t we start this whole thing over, okay?”

Hazel lets her head fall back on her seat. Hannah thinks she looks tired and pale, that she could use a rare steak and a full day out in the sun, away from the noise of radios and self-righteous ideology.

“Last I heard,” Hazel says, now kind of languid, maybe even, Hannah thinks, kind of sultry, “you were still a narc cop. I’m not dealing and I’m barely using and you guys are not known for your love of the Canal Zone. So, why this visit, Detective Shaw? Is there a reason for you harassing me and Elmore?”

“You’re the eternal teenager, Hazel. Can’t tell love from harassment. Normally people know when I’m harassing them.”

“The contusions are always a giveaway.”

“I’m not narcotics anymore. I’m homicide.”

“Would that be a promotion or a demotion?”

Hannah gives a mock smile. “I just want to have a little talk with you, sweet one. Elmore was just being a nuisance. I think he’s too interested in you, by the way.”

“Is this where you make the pitch for the convent school?”

Hannah smiles and says, “No, this is where I ask you what the fuck you were doing at the Hyenas’ clubhouse.”

Bingo. The timing and delivery were perfect. Lenore would be proud. Now she needs to capitalize before Hazel can think up a convincing lie.

“You backsliding, little sister?” she snaps. “You bored with the art world here? You anxious to sell your ass for all the Cambodian fuckers over on Hip Sing Street?”

“Hannah—” Hazel begins, coming upright in the booth, but Hannah’s not ready to let her explain, she wants to land a few more jabs.

“Nothing interesting happens in the Park that I don’t hear about. And white-trash bohemian bitches putting out for jarheads is definitely considered interesting.”

Hazel knows she’s beat. Part of her knew it the minute Hannah took hold of her arm out on the street. She goes docile and simply says, “You going to bust me?”

Hannah cocks her head like this is the most stupid remark she’s heard this season and says, “For what?”

“Oh,” Hazel says weakly, “you people need a reason these days.”

Hannah excises all the sarcasm and threat from her voice and speaks clearly and evenly. “The bantering part of this discussion is over, Hazel. Now sit quiet and listen to me. I’m a homicide cop. I’m also the department’s unofficial liaison to the Park. That means I know as much gang shit as the gang squad. It means I still meet up with the vice people more often than they like. If it takes place in Bangkok Park, then very simply, I am involved. By this point, everyone on both sides of the legal fence has come to understand and accept that. I think you should too.”

Hazel gives a single nod and Hannah goes on.

“Now, you probably heard about the priest who got torched in St. Brendan’s. Somebody poured benzine all over this poor bastard’s head and lit him up like a fucking rocket. Back in August, the Angkor Hyenas pulled the same stunt on a bodega that was under the protection of the Granada Street Popes. So either the Hyenas whacked the priest or somebody, maybe the Popes, maybe somebody else, wants me to think it was the Hyenas. Do you follow the story so far?”

Another nod.

“Now, we’ve had an idiot named Zarelli sitting watch over the Cambodians’ little shop on Hip Sing. And he gives me a call the other day that some blond punk goddess just strolled in the front door of slopeland. And in the back of my brain, though I don’t want to believe it, I’ve got a hunch who the Hyenas’ visitor could be. So, I follow up my hunch, ’cause I want to confirm this news before I take any action. And goddamn if my hunch doesn’t end up the truth. So, now you are going to sit there, little sister, and tell me in simple words what the fucking meeting was all about. And if it was to buy your way back into that cesspool that Lenore pulled you out of, you’re going to wish you never put your seventeen-year-old ass on a Greyhound to Quinsigamond.”

Hazel swallows, closes her eyes, rubs fingers over the bridge of her nose, opens her eyes, and looks at Hannah.

“It’s not what you think,” she says.

Hannah doesn’t speak.

“We had heard, some people had heard—”

“What people?” Hannah asks.

“Some of the hackers,” Hazel says, pleading slightly. “The little goofs with the keyboards and the modems. They kind of hang around the radio fringe. They think we’re retro but hip. They—”

“What did they hear?”

“They heard there was a huge boost at this warehouse out near Boston Harbor.”

“Go ahead,” Hannah says.

“I don’t know, you know, it was all rumor—”

“Tell me the rumor,” Hannah says.

“Huge haul. Professional. Had to be. It would take semis to clear out this place. Drivers and muscle to move the shipping crates. And buy-offs. These places use real security. You boost a shipping warehouse, you know, you really piss off the big insurance companies. Last goddamn people you want to piss off.”

“Come on, come on,” Hannah says, intrigued but impatient.

“The rumor was that the haul, part of the haul anyway, was radio shit.”

“Radio shit?”

“Yeah, quality stuff — Japan Radio, Sony, Otari.”

“Go on,” Hannah says, suddenly unsure of the. conversation, feeling an annoying shift in the air as Hazel picks up pace and a little volume.

“Well, Jesus, you know, of course this would be merchandise my people would be interested in.”

“The Wireless crowd,” Hannah says, and Hazel nods and picks up Hannah’s coffee mug.

“I mean we’d have to be talking forty percent off wholesale, even on minimum quantity.”

Hannah shakes her head. “Back up. How does this rumor bring you down to the Hyenas?”

Hazel squints at her as if the question surprises her.

“Everyone in the Zone says the Hyenas are on the move now. Since Cortez left, the Popes are in disarray. This was a huge boost, Hannah. Even if it was strictly Providence-Italian, they’ll need some distribution. We figured if the Italians shopped even part of it to Bangkok, it’d be through the Hyenas. We just wanted to be on the list to buy. You know, crap like this doesn’t fall into your lap every week.”

Hazel ends with a shrug and takes a long drink of coffee. She looks up to see Elmore back at the cashier’s station, revising menus and stealing glances her way.

Hannah shifts her weight, looks down at Elmore but doesn’t say a word. After a minute she slides back into her jacket and starts to get out of the booth.

She does a long stretch with her arms, cracks her knuckles out in front of her, and says, “First off, I’ll be checking on a warehouse boost in Boston Harbor.” She pushes her hands into her jacket pockets and says, “Then I’ll be back down here to check on you again.”

Hazel stays seated and raises her mug in a toast.

“Anytime, Detective. Next time let’s make it dinner. It’s always such a treat.”

22

A slow parade of moody regulars is starting to file into Elmore’s Rib Room for the 5 P.M. early bird special — vegetarian chili and fresh brown bread. Elmore thinks it’s some kind of crime to serve vegetarian chili in a joint that calls itself the Rib Room, but you’ve got to know your market and most of these kids put the kibosh on meat-eating.

Elmore’s got the radio tuned in to WQSG and the place is filled with the sounds of Grandslam Grab Bag, a suppertime call-in sports show. Most of the Canal Zone crowd aren’t big sports fans, but everyone’s aching for the O’Zebedee Brothers to make a hit and QSG is the most likely target.

And sure enough, at about ten after five, as Elmore is pushing a plateful of diced scallions into his chili kettle, a furious argument about designated hitters is cut off in midholler and three high-pitched trumpet blasts announce the jam.

Bunt this, you bunheads. Yer outta the game. Suspended for the duration. Hit the showers running. O’ZBON clears the bases once again.

A spontaneous cheer explodes in the restaurant, followed by a wave of applause and whistles.

The broadcasting brothers of bedlam are back. The sibling spirit voices of subterranea are signal-sailing into your souls. Crank it up, Elmore, this dinner crowd is about to feast on fib-free fodder.

Enough, Brother John, with the asinine alliteration. God, it’s infectious.

Which brings us to today’s topic — infectious diseases. Like Doubt. I said it — the dreaded D-word. And I’m sorry, but keeping silent about our growing problem only makes everything worse. Our sources tell us that since we last spoke, more and more of you, who for the past five years pined for our return to Q-town, are walking around like some spike-haired minor league existentialists moaning, “O’Zbon is dead and anarchy is absurd.” It’s an interesting turn of events — in our absence, our cult grows and flourishes; upon our return, the number of true believers starts to dwindle. I guess faith is easy to maintain from a distance. But when the brothers’ voice is heard on the home front, belief turns into a greased pig. Goddamn hard to hold onto.

Yeah, and it’s weird ’cause this is the opposite of what we always thought. I guess absence does make the heart grow fonder and familiarity will sometimes breed a very hip contempt.

Now, there are two roads that Jimbo and I can navigate in this situation. We can pull up stakes tonight, get back on the interstate, and never give another thought to the hometown and the past. Or we can try to understand this backlash, do a biopsy on the locus of the doubt, work with the doubters, put ourselves at risk, and try to make you all certain that we are who we say we are.

Amen, bro. We am who is.

It’s got to be one road or the other, ’cause like Elvis said — and I mean the dead one — we can’t go on together, with suspicious minds.

I was thinking our problem over at about four A.M. and I started to wonder why we were such a hit last time ’round. Was it the freshness, the typical rush that greets any new idea or product? Yeah, it was that, but it was more than that. Since the collective we crawled out of the bubbling, primordial ooze, slapped on a bearskin, and moved into a cave, we’ve been hooked on the one narcotic that never fails to fix. Absolutely addictive on initial contact. I’m speaking, of course, of the big M. Myth. That loop of an all-too-human story that was birthed in the slime and slop and salty blood of primeval consciousness. We listen to it waking and sleeping. We suck on it with each breath we pull in. We live it out in each minute step of our inconsequential lifetimes.

When we first passed Go with our initial broadcast, my brother and I put a new spin on a specific section of an old story and bounced it down to the playground where it would be most appreciated, sustained, enjoyed — Quinsigamond’s little bohemia, the Canal Zone.

And you guys grabbed the ball and ran. What we thought was a harmless and onetime prank was entirely something else by the time it hit your unconventional ears. We were the classic rebel and madman visionary, the bad boys with the lineage that stretched from the nameless shamans of the foggy past down to St. Ti Jean and his misunderstood wanderlust. We called black white and up down and underscored the patter with a backbeat you could dance to. We were anonymous and that meant we could be anyone. We were unlicensed and that meant we were the enemies of authority.

And so, though we never planned it this way, we appealed to a wide variety of local subsets here in the city. Little groups, hybrids, cults. Small families that had nothing in common with one another, other than the fact that they felt excluded from the mainstream. And that now they had a voice that would speak for them.

Do I need to say that that kind of faith scared us as much as the Feds coming to town?

So, we ran. Picked up an AAA atlas and eased up the on-ramp. Injected ourselves into the interstate asphalt veins of this great land.

And an odd thing happened out there on the road. We started to miss being needed. That mantle of spokesman that was hung on our pirate signal started, in retrospect, to feel good and warm. So, after a time, we rolled back home.

But doesn’t life have a way of stacking events into ironies? When we left, we were the Kings of Anarchy. When we returned, we were impostors to the throne.

But we never changed, folks. We never altered a thing. It’s the same James. The same John. And, mostly, it’s the same goddamn equipment.

You’ve got us rattled here, people. You’re making our dreams chaotic. We’re having historic nightmares—

Almost time, John-boy.

Now, the way I hear it, not only are you doubting the O’Z, but you’re fighting among yourselves. I hear a little schism brewed up back at the ranch while we were on tour. Little bird tells me that some internal dissension is on the wax. I hear from the underground vine that some of the charter members who want “jam for the sake of jam” are butting heads with a cadre of liberation-technology greenhorns.

Time, Johnno.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s not forget, people, that all the biggies, from Rome on down, tend to collapse from within. I’d like to say, “What the O’Zebedees have joined let no sibling savaging put asunder.” But your future is not up to us. We could end up back on the road by tomorrow. One phone call could have us highway bound. We’re commentators, not progenitors. You built up your family yourselves. And you can tear it apart from within if that’s what you want to do. I know that right now it may seem like there’s no solution to your dilemmas. That petty jealousies have turned into momentous ideologies. Simple squabbles into complex campaigns. All I can advise is to find an arbiter and latch onto any common ground, even the most craggy. Because if you sever the blood knots and burn down the family home, you walk alone. And what happened once will happen again. Your subgroups will divide into more subgroups. Community cancer, folks. Until each is just a group of one. And then you’ll divide within yourself, within your heart.

Look, it’s James again. One arm wants to carry on the tradition unchanged, keep things pure and on a completely artistic and comedic and symbolic level. The other arm wants to start lobbing bombs at antennas, injecting viruses into the stations’ mainframes. I agree that those are pretty divergent goals. But you’ve got to look inward, find the common vein that flows back toward the brain. Now we’ve really got to run.

Okay, we’ve got to cut out. Listen, where I come from we used to have this trick. It went like this — when you lose faith, act like you still have it and it will come back. Don’t try to figure the logic of that. Just give us a break here, huh?

C’mon, Juan, I’m cutting the signal.

Okay, okay. Flash to the orphaned entrepreneur. Something’s rotten in Denmark. Our sources say to watch your step. Things aren’t what they seem. Wish we could get more specific, but we’re just giving it as we get it and—

John, for Christ sake.

All right already. We’re out of here. You’ve got our future in your ears, friends. Believe in us as the one, true O’Zebedee Brothers Outlaw Network or be prepared for our demise.

The Choice is always yours.

Hic Calix.

23

Ronnie has just started to doze when the alarm goes off. Flynn comes bolt upright with a surge of panic. Ronnie lowers the volume on the clock radio with one hand and with the other eases Flynn back down onto the pillows.

“Just the alarm,” she says in her most soothing voice. “I’ve got to shower. I’m on in an hour.”

Flynn watches her slide out of bed. “You could call in sick.”

She stops in the doorway, turns back to him, covers her breasts with her arms, watches him roll his eyes.

“You want Ray Todd on the air for the rest of the night? We can’t do that to the city.”

“You’re too public-spirited. Makes for a lousy hedonist.”

“Yeah, well, even hedonists need a paycheck.”

“Move in with me,” Flynn says. “We’ll set up a remote at my place. You can broadcast from the bed. Give the show a real edge.”

“I think the show has enough of an edge already.”

She turns and heads for the shower and yells back, “You want to join me in here?”

He swings his legs off the mattress and says, “And on top of everything else she’s a mind reader.”

Ronnie has one of those yellow plastic waterproof radios hanging by a black plastic strap from the neck of the shower nozzle. As Flynn climbs into the tub, she turns on WQSG. Flynn moves in and hugs her around the waist and they step under the spray of water. Ronnie takes an orange bar of soap from the dish and hands it over her shoulder to Flynn and he goes to work on her back. She closes her eyes, points her face up at the jet of water, and listens to the radio. Ray Todd is in standard form.

Hello, Quinsigamond, and welcome back to our final hour of City Soapbox. I am your host, of course, Raymond Todd, and God willing, we may just make it through an entire program without being assaulted and knocked into limbo by the lawless degenerates who’ve been trying so desperately to grab some headlines the past few weeks. If you’ve just joined us, please be advised that we’re not taking any calls for the next thirty minutes. This is a memorial segment of sorts, an interview taped shortly before the tragic and violent demise of Father Andre Todorov. As will soon become apparent to you, I am not a supporter or follower of the late Father Todorov. At best, I would have to call him a sadly misguided figure, bamboozled by a misreading of history and an excessive ego. I’m afraid his horrid death cannot and will not alter my assessment. I broadcast this interview simply as a glaring warning, a piercingly clear example of the apocalyptic dangers inherent in the humanistic ideology. Whether the savage animals who hideously murdered this confused man will ever be apprehended matters very little in the end. Because, and hear me now, they are a minute manifestation of the coming evils. How ironic that Father Todorov contributed to the plague that caused his own demise. How pathetic. If the engineer will roll the tape, let’s listen to the sounds of our own doom.

There’s a second of air hiss and then a mechanical-sounding run of musical scales.

… My guest in the studio tonight is himself no stranger to local headlines. If you’ve been following the series of Spy articles over the past year or so, you’re certainly familiar with Father Andre Todorov, associate pastor of St. Brendan’s Cathedral in the heart of downtown. In the year since Father Todorov has been installed in his position at the cathedral, he’s been relentless in his well-publicized dedication to what he calls “social action with the emphasis on action.” The good father is the founder of the Calvary Peace Coalition and the Assisi Shelter down on LaBran Avenue. But the past few month have seen Father Todorov turn his energies to the growing gang problem that’s descended on our city. Before the break, Father, you’d begun to correct some of my misconceptions about the gang menace. Let’s explore the facts a bit, as I like to say. How many established gangs are there currently in the city?

That’s difficult to say, Ray. We know, of course, about the top two. The Granada Street Popes, mainly from the Colombian community. And their growing rival, the Angkor Hyenas, comprised of Cambodian refugees. There are certainly three other smaller clubs that have emerged on the borders of Bangkok Park.

And they are?

The Tonton Loas, who seem to have a strong Haitian tradition, the Castlebar Road Boys, who define themselves as an Irish fraternal organization, and the Sal Mineos—

The Pecci family’s errand boys.

Please, Mr. Todd—

’Scuse me, Father. Can you tell us, which have you had the most contact with?

I am equally available to all the rival factions. We’re not here tonight to provoke any group by negating their importance in the overall peace.

Peace being the main objective in your ministry among these gangs?

Of course. I don’t see—

Would you agree, Father, without delving into the requisite sociological causes, that the main activity of these gangs, indeed, their very reason for being, is criminal—

Now, wait a minute, Mr. Todd. These are youths from a blighted landscape. They turn to the gang life as a matter of survival, a system for living where there is no other system.

But let’s be clear and honest here, Father Todorov. That system is comprised of thievery, drug dealing, arms dealing, extortion, and the general, wholesale spreading of terror—

You’re making very provocative remarks about an extremely complicated problem—

There was nothing complicated about the firebombing of the New Ponce Bodega last week—

That incident has not been proven to be gang-related, Mr. Todd.

I think what confuses most people, Father, is your insistence on devoting your time and effort to an element with very little respect for law and life—

We have to start somewhere. As Christ said, it’s the sick man who needs the doctor. These young people have to be taught other skills—

Blame everything on ignorance, yes? Tell me, Father, what about these radio jammers who’ve begun to prey on us? Clearly these aren’t ignorant savages.

I didn’t say … I’m here to talk about the gang problem. I don’t know anything about these jammers.

Just what you read in the papers, I’m sure.

I don’t see—

I’m curious, when you venture down to Bangkok town, do you wear the collar, Father?

Not always, no. The idea is to first establish a rapport. And I’ve found if I dress in street clothes, it’s a sign … I find it’s the first step toward intimacy. It helps to remove the threat of my a priori role as an authority figure.

You do acknowledge, however, that you are, in fact, an authority figure. Correct, Father?

I’m perceived this way. The image of the adult, white, male priest. The force of the historical image is a powerful, stubborn symbol to overcome. I—

Do these gang members ever confess their crimes to you, Father?

Well, first, Ray, as you well know, we confess sins, not crimes. And secondly, most of the gangs are not Catholic.

Most?

Well, the Granada Street Popes are. And the new one out of Ireland — the Castlebar Road Boys.

And these two, they claim to be members of the Church?

What I mean is, they were raised in the tradition. Their native cultures are—

Could you briefly distinguish between crime and sin for me, Father?

Excuse me?

Crime versus sin. Please.

[Pause] Well, I mean, it appears obvious to me. A crime is a violation of a man-made law—

And a sin—

Would be an affront to, a disruption of, one’s individual conscience. I don’t see—

Now, last month there, when you and your little coalition drove down Route 63 to the industrial park and poured human blood all over the lobby of the Gibson Tech corporate office. Would that there be a sin or a crime?

I don’t see how this concerns the gang issue. I thought we were here to discuss—

And so we are. Which brings me to my question, did one of those street scum gangboys supply you people with the blood? “Lucky day, Father T. Got a big red barrel full of B negative from a little grandmother we just gutted.”

[Yelling] Mr. Todd, for God’s sake—

[Yelling] And you’ve got a hell of a nerve invoking the name of God, you Marxist insult to Rome—

[noise of microphone coming loose]

… is ridiculous … despicable …

[Yelling] Keep walking, you liberal humanist fraud. Your days are numbered, you—

Ray is cut off, but not by a jammer. The WQSG theme music comes up and a prerecorded promo blurbs the station’s virtues and then segues into an ad for a medical malpractice attorney.

Ronnie and Flynn are on the tub floor, gulping air and water spray, hearts pumping, leg muscles trembling. After a second, Ronnie opens her eyes and looks at Flynn. A smile breaks out on his face. And then, at the same time, they both begin laughing.

“I guess Raymond gets to us both,” Ronnie says over the blast of the water.

24

Loke steps through his office door to find Detective Hannah Shaw seated behind his desk, her booted heels resting on his blotter, a thick leather-bound book open in her lap.

Though he’s affronted by her display, Loke nods as if he’s impressed, maybe a little amused, by the audacity, the sheer in-your-face disrespect. But Hannah’s not even looking up to see his grin and his nod. She’s running a finger along something of particular interest in the book. As she reads, she shifts in her seat, digs a hand into a pocket of her leather jacket, and lackadaisically pulls out a badge pinned in a custom leather wallet. She waves the badge around over her head like it was a flag or some kind of college pennant.

Finally she finishes reading, looks up, points to a chair, and in a put-on enthused voice says, “Loke, you little devil, why don’t you have a seat?”

Loke stands still for a second trying to decide which way to play it, then remembers the lecture he’s just had to endure at Uncle Chak’s place. He slides into a chair before the teak desk and says, “You must be Detective Shaw. I am so honored. We finally get a chance to meet.”

Hannah repockets her badge and says, “We’ll both remember the day for years to come.”

Loke widens his eyes and says, “No doubt,” in some weird accent like William Buckley gone Asian.

Hannah lifts the book she’s been reading from her lap and reshelves it in the case behind Loke’s desk. “Quite a page turner there,” she says. “Jesus, those Khmer Rouge are imaginative bastards. I never would have guessed there were so many uses for trash bags.”

“You use what you have,” Loke says, his hands tossed out to the side like a bored magician.

“And pragmatic,” Hannah says. “You can suffocate the victim and dispose of the remains. Such clever little pricks.”

Loke gives a smile that he thinks is modest, then says, “I must be one of the last players in Bangkok Park to meet Hannah Shaw.”

Hannah comes forward to the desk and brings her back rigid. “Well, I don’t usually get down to the errand-boy level—”

Loke cuts her off, still good-natured, and says, “‘Warlord,’ if you don’t mind. I’m such a stickler when it comes to language.”

Hannah nods and squints. “Whatever. You guys are all a little anal for me. For the record, though, you don’t use my first name. I’m Detective Shaw to you, son. That’s the first rule and it’s a goddamned important one.”

“Of course, Detective. I didn’t mean to be rude—”

“I’m sure you didn’t,” Hannah says. “Just like you didn’t mean to fry that hotshot priest down St. Brendan’s.”

Loke immediately starts shaking his head. He stands up and walks to the desk, plants his hands on the teak, and looks down at Hannah. “The Hyenas had nothing to do with that. You can talk to my uncle—”

Hannah stands up and matches his heat. “Your Uncle Chak doesn’t cut any shit with me, you little jarhead bastard. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? Uncle Chak is a loose wing nut with too few brains and too small balls. No Asian in this town has ever crossed Doc Cheng and lived out the year, you stupid bastard. Not even the Japanese. There’s a system down here that works and it pisses me off when some dick-head slope who stepped off the boat Wednesday and moved some smack on Friday suddenly thinks he can fuck with the whole machine.”

Loke stares at her, brings his voice back to friendly, and says, “Why are you here, Detective?”

“You sit back down, junior,” she says, and he does, slowly. “I know the whole story about you and your family. Uncle Chak wouldn’t even be breathing if the Latinos hadn’t had a power vacuum at a crucial moment.”

Loke makes an ugly grin at her. “Ah yes,” he says. “Mr. Cortez. The King of Bangkok Park. My understanding is he had to leave town in a great hurry. I’ve heard rumors about Cortez. Wasn’t he a close friend of your mentor? What was her name? Lee-Ann? Lorraine? Something …”

Hannah takes a second, steadies herself, and leers back. “That’s it, friend. Show me the extent of your ignorance. Tip your whole hand. Jesus, it comes down in the genes.”

“Again, Detective, I don’t mean to offend. Like everyone in the Park, I simply hear rumors.”

Hannah looks over to the floor-to-ceiling cabinets to her left and says, “Cortez would have gutted your fat uncle on a whim. Had him served as the weekend special at Chak’s own noodle joint.”

She looks back at Loke and head-motions to the cabinet. “What’s in there?”

Loke loves the question. “The usual, Detective. Office supplies. Paper. Pens. Instant coffee.”

Hannah rubs her eyes. “Decaf, I’m sure.”

She gets up from the desk, turns her back to Loke, and studies the wall maps of Cambodia and Quinsigamond. Without turning back around, she says, “I believe that you didn’t whack the priest.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” Loke says.

Hannah shrugs, moves a fingertip up to follow a local street, and says, “You’re not smart enough to grab a Yale diploma, even with Chak’s big check to the endowment. But you’re not stupid or ragged enough to make that public a hit for no reason.”

“The Hyenas have enough to be concerned about. We have no need to murder an innocent civilian.”

Hannah turns around.

“Then who did it?” she asks. “And why do they want us to think it’s you?”

Loke shrugs and tries to look bored. “Maybe the Popes? We’ve been having our differences, as you know.”

Hannah shrugs back at him. “Maybe.”

“It could be anyone, Detective. Maybe the Castlebar Road Boys. Those Irish, they always have the religious hang-ups.”

Hannah walks over to him, raises her right leg, and plants her boot on the cushion of Loke’s chair, her pointed toe a half inch from his crotch.

Loke raises his eyebrows, looks from the boot up to Hannah, and says, “It would never work, Detective. The difference in our ages—”

Hannah cuts him off and in a low voice says, “You had a visitor in here recently, didn’t you, asshole?”

“I don’t know—”

The toe of her boot edges forward just a bit and she lowers it just enough to touch the inseam of Loke’s pants.

“You answer my fucking question right now, you dickhead Ivy League scumbag. You’ve got no idea what kind of problems I can bring into your life. You already know I carry some kind of weight down here. You know that because Uncle Chak told you. But Uncle Chak is a lightweight jarhead who hasn’t been playing the Park long enough to know who backs me or why. He doesn’t know how I figure in the landscape. And he can’t risk anyone in his family pissing me off until he finds out.”

She applies some more pressure onto his crotch. His eyes stay fixed on her.

“That’s a position I love to be in, junior. I love to be feared. So keep me happy. You shiver a little bit. And you tell me who came to visit you.”

“Obviously,” Loke says, a small catch in his throat as if he needed a sip of water, “you already know.”

“I want to hear you say it, junior.”

He takes a breath, puts his hands on the arms of the chair, smiles. “A young woman named Hazel. An artist type from down in the Canal Zone.”

She stares at him for about thirty seconds, then puts her foot back on the floor and says, “Very good. What did she want? And if you make any kind of joke — any lewd reference or comment — I’ll pick a bone in your face and break it.”

He believes her. Even with six of his best muscle-boys shooting billiards outside, he knows she’s telling the truth.

“She’s looking to immigrate. Into the Park. She wants Hyena protection. She wants a franchise.”

Hannah makes a long sigh in spite of herself. She gives Loke a single, long bow of the head.

“Is she connected to you?” Loke asks. “Is there a problem with this?”

“Did you touch her?”

“I didn’t lay a hand on her,” Loke says. “I don’t touch white women.”

Hannah stares at him, but somehow his comment defuses itself, drains her edge, and she decides it’s time to leave. She takes a step to the door, stops, and says, “Wise policy, junior. That woman’s a walking plague.”

Loke’s face gives nothing up.

“If you hear who lit up the priest,” Hannah says, “be sure and give me a call.”

Loke simply says, “Come again, Detective.”

“Believe me,” Hannah says, “I will.”

25

In the glass elevator, on the way up to the studio, Ronnie and Flynn neck like anxious teenagers, breathless and dizzy, mouths overly wet and heads bobbing and twitching in an imitation of panic. They’re awkward, hands colliding in midgrope, feet stutter-stepping as they reposition. And they’re both gleeful about their awkwardness, as if it was a sign of youth and unexplainable innocence.

Flynn especially finds the feeling a wonder drug, a therapy sent from God, unasked. Since their airport slow dance his body has started to believe he’s seventeen again, bone and muscle still growing, every possibility untapped. There was no loginess or heaviness when he woke in the morning, no preoccupation and instinctual prioritizing. He feels like his vision is sharper, his teeth more rooted in his gums. He feels like his lungs have been stripped of some greasy film that caused them to work at minimal efficiency.

He moves his mouth to Ronnie’s neck and sucks there and he can feel her shiver and push in against him. He entwines his legs between hers. He lets his hand fall from her breast to the waist of her skirt. His fingers hook over the edge, nab her shirt, and start to untuck it.

The elevator bell rings and she steps backward from him in a stumble and starts to straighten clothing and hair, staring at him the whole time, no words, but a lot of breathing and the wetting of her lips with her tongue. Flynn looks at her and shakes his head and says, “There’s no way I’m going to make it till two A.M.”

She tucks her shirt in slowly and says, “Maybe you won’t have to.”

They move out of the elevator and turn right toward the studio. He falls behind her and gooses her and she makes a playful, blind swat backward with her hand.

Through the huge plate glass they can see Ray in dim light, hovering behind the microphone in a cloud of cigarette smoke. The corridor speaker is shut off, but his mouth is moving. Ronnie stops for a second to watch him.

“Well, he didn’t get bumped tonight. Your pals must be vacationing.”

“Not my pals,” Flynn says, surprised by her comment.

“Look at him,” she says, “I wonder what the topic is now.”

“Isn’t it always the same?”

“It’s weird. He’s got a short menu. Strictly seventies rants. Fluoride. Interferon. The trilateral commission. Teddy Kennedy. Sun Myung Moon. It’s like his buttons jammed in ’75 and he’s never moved on. I mean, he doesn’t even slag the Japanese. Not a word about Latin America. I always figure even the other nuts must think he’s a relic.”

They move inside and Wayne waves to them from behind his board. Ronnie nods and then leads the way through a side door to a small break room. It’s a little brighter inside. There’s a green vinyl couch, a coffee table covered with trade magazines, a brown mini-refrigerator with a Mr. Coffee on top of it, and a few mismatched folding chairs.

“All the luxuries,” Ronnie says.

The walls and the ceiling are all faded white acoustic squares with hundreds of tiny pinholes. One wall is dominated by a huge cork bulletin board that’s plastered with pushpinned newspaper clippings, more than half of which have yellowed. It’s a depressing sight. Ronnie gestures to the board with her head and says, “It’s Ray’s. News for the brain-dead. I don’t know where he gets them.”

Flynn spots a headline that reads, “Soviets Using Psychic Clone Moles Deep in Pentagon.”

The other walls are filled with a few promotional posters from station advertisers and there’s a large, wood-framed photograph of a red-faced barrel-chested middle-aged man wearing a charcoal suit with shoulders so square they look like they were fitted with two-by-fours. The man has a severe look on his face, like he’s ignoring a migraine long enough to plot military strategy. He’s posed, holding a pair of bifocals out away from his body.

“That’s Federman,” Ronnie says. “The station owner.”

“Looks like a real pit bull.”

Ronnie shrugs. “Never met him in my life.”

She hands him a kelly-green coffee mug with WQSG in white block letters stamped on the side. She fills both their mugs halfway, then digs her mescal flask from her bag and fills the rest with booze.

“That’s the beauty of this stuff,” she says. “You can mix it with everything. It doesn’t corrupt. I’ve tried.”

“You’re on the air in ten,” Flynn says. “Isn’t this illegal?”

She smiles and rolls her eyes. “You want to spend four hours unmedicated, talking to the sexually dysfunctional? Show some mercy.”

Flynn sips at the mescal and Folgers, makes a face, and says, “I’m saving all the mercy for later.”

Ronnie says, “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.”

He wants her to smile, but again she doesn’t. She walks over to the mounted wall speaker and turns a knob on the bottom. The room fills with Ray’s voice.

What is it you’re trying to suggest to me, sir? What is it you want me to accept? What I’m asking, very simply, is, what is your agenda?

And if you’ll give me a minute to—

Because perhaps we can save everyone some time and aggravation. Because if what you want to poison us with — no, wait — more to the point, if what you want to poison our children with is more evolutionary clap-trap from the camp of leftist atheistic homosexual heathens, then I’m going to have to pull your plug, my friend—

I’m sorry, but not everyone who sees the scientific inconsistencies in creationism is gay or a socialist or an atheist. You want to paint everyone—

Yes, honey, we know, it’s a tough life. Are we going to have a little tantrum now?

Can we stay on the point? Can we please just stick to the topic—

Listen, darling, you have begun to bore me. Next call, Earl from the north side.

“Creationism,” Flynn says. “We’ve picked a good night.”

“Not bad,” Ronnie says. “Gun control is a good night. Nixon is a good night. The Knights of Malta is a fantastic night. He gets screaming. One time, Wayne and I had a bet about a coronary. I think that was the night he said Klaus Barbie has been misunderstood. Bad press and weak-minded historians. You should’ve read the mail that week.”

Flynn walks over to the bulletin board and starts to read clippings.

“How much of Ray is gimmick and how much is from the heart?”

Ronnie moves up next to him and he thinks he hears her sigh.

“Radio’s a weird business,” she says. “I think Ray’s like a lot of people. It starts out as gimmick. You pick a schtick you’re pretty good at. Something that comes natural. Then a lot of late nights go by and you talk to more loons than most people see in a lifetime and at some point your voice sort of takes over. The words just slide out. You don’t think about it a whole lot.”

Without looking at her, Flynn asks, “What about with you?”

She doesn’t say anything, gives out a quick brush-off laugh.

He pushes it. “I mean, you’re this Zen master of the sensual, right? Authority on things erotic. How’d that end up your schtick?”

The door opens and Wayne sticks his head in.

“You’re on in five,” he says. “Ray is doing windup after the spot.”

Ronnie nods, raises her mug up to him, and he disappears. She takes a long swallow from her mug, refills it, and starts out the door. Flynn follows her to the broadcast booth and they stand in the doorway staring at Ray’s back, watching him sit rigid with one arm parallel next to the mike, a cigarette with a long head of ash jammed between his index and middle fingers. Over the booth speaker comes the close-out music for a mortuary ad. Ray twists his head from side to side as violins fade. Watching him, Flynn almost expects to hear an awful, high- pitched scraping noise escape from the guy’s shirt collar. The sound of a rusted pipe being forced from a welded joint. Instead, there’s a few moments of silence that become dramatic, almost uncomfortable. Flynn can feel anticipation blooming, a readiness or yearning in every set of ears tuned to QSG. Ray knows how to work the invisible audience. There’s no need for eye contact or physical presence. All Ray needs is the sound of his voice, his ability to lower timbre and increase the richness of tone and construct a fullness in the vibrations emitting from his larynx. The man knows how to play the pauses, knows, instinctively, the power of timing.

If it wasn’t for his lack Of control, Flynn thinks, he could be captivating, a real aural commodity.

Ray takes in a last drag from the Camel, blows it out over the mike in a long vapory line, and begins his summation.

My friends, I think you know as well as I do that we barely scratched the surface here tonight. We’ve quoted scripture and shown the folly of man, the weakness of his science and his ego. We’ve let the crackpots have their say, within the limits of decency. Let the liberal-spewing eggheads and lovers of darkness vent their routine spleen. It’s been over a century since Mr. Charles Darwin trotted his little simian sideshow across our path. And in that time his doctrine has infiltrated our schools, assaulted the minds of our children until they turned their backs on truth and righteousness. Perhaps those of us blessed with the knowledge of the divine wisdom haven’t fought hard enough. Perhaps our weakness is the greatest outrage of all. I don’t know.

[Pause. Voice rising]

But I do know that the Millenium is coming. It is racing down upon us like a blazing chariot. We’re already starting to feel its flames on our mortal skin. Those are the flames of eternal damnation, the province of the dark one, the final home of the wicked and the cursed. The place where the seeds we have sown in this life will bear fruit forever after. There are choices to be made in the days ahead. Battles waged. The worst kind of battles. Civil wars. Blood struggles between kin. There are two mighty armies readying to clash. They carry the same blood in their hearts, but they’ve been divided by choices of the soul. There is a family of light.

[Pause. Voice rising]

And make no mistake, there is a family of darkness. We know these two clans by different names from time immemorial. The family of Righteousness and the family of Evil. The family of Truth and the family of Falsehood. The family of Order and the family of Chaos. They’ve clashed since the archangel Michael cast Lucifer downward. There can be no compromise between them. Only one family can prevail.

[Pause]

And so, I think our discussion tonight can be seen in the larger picture. Its implications are staggering. The question is nothing less than — Are we men, made in the image and likeness of God, or are we soulless animals, creatures of the flesh void of any chance for redemption? Darkness or Light? Order or Chaos? The days of tabling that question are over. Each of us must seize the truth and fight the enemy with a viciousness that won’t allow defeat.

[Pause, a long audible breath]

Next time: Jane Fonda, the International Monetary Fund, and the Book of Revelation. I’m Raymond Todd. Good night and God speed.

He queues up his theme music — a weird, midspeed mix of something like organ and zither. It makes Flynn uncomfortable and he’s grateful when Wayne fades into the top-of-the-hour network news feed.

Ronnie moves forward, reaches down, and mutes the lead report about an air crash at O’Hare. She leans over Ray’s shoulder and says, “They let you alone tonight, big guy. How come?”

Ray doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge her or relinquish his chair. He continues to draw on his cigarette and stare past the hanging microphone out the plate glass at the dim corridor beyond. Finally he wheels backward, collects his things, a pack of Camels and a clipboard fat with scrappy mismatched pieces of paper.

“Tide is turning, sister,” he finally says, giving a look to Flynn, who nods.

“Smells that way,” Ronnie says, sliding into the seat and adjusting the headphones over her ears.

“I’ll leave you to your little orgy,” Ray says to Flynn on the way out of the booth.

“Pleasure meeting you,” Flynn says back.

“Get comfortable,” Ronnie says, and Flynn settles down on a small stool behind her. Through a window to their left they can see Wayne on the phone in the engineer’s booth, lining up Ronnie’s first calls.

Ronnie brings up the volume on the news and they come in on the upbeat close-out story, really just a headline and a few words of follow-up on a young girl in Nova Scotia who found a classic message in a bottle. Then the network announcer signs off and the theme music comes up.

Wayne breaks in to ask, “All set?”

Ronnie takes a sip of coffee and nods while adjusting the position of her mike.

“I got a nonorgasmic twenty-eight-year-old female banker on line one,” Wayne says, “an impotent gay musician with chronic nightmares about wild dogs on line two. Line three is standard bondage, male. And line four is a recent divorcee with a bad body image.”

Ronnie hits a button on the board and says, “Gimme the wild dogs and tell the divorcee to hang on.”

Flynn watches Wayne nod and slide on two different headsets — one heavy model around his neck, and another light, black plastic model over his ears. The ear set has a small tube-like mouthpiece that curves to the front of his lips. He looks like a NASA programmer. His hands are both on a mixing board that’s below the level of the window. An ad for a real estate development fades and the theme music to Ronnie’s show starts up — some low-key after-hours pseudo-jazz, alto sax, light brush drum, a little piano doodle. Flynn wonders who chose this theme and if they thought it appropriate to the show. And now, listening closely for the first time, instead of sitting in the darkness of his study, lying in the dentist’s chair and anticipating the sound of Ronnie’s voice, he decides it is appropriate, somehow it does convey the mood.

A pretaped announcer’s voice slides on, female, very low, on the verge of raspy, suggestive. It says, “Live from downtown Quinsigamond, it’s Libido Liveline, with your host Ronnie Wilcox.”

Ronnie takes a sip from her mug, tilts her head back, and lets the coffee run down her throat in a slow trickle. Then she takes in some air, lets it out through rounded lips like she was blowing a smoke ring, and as Wayne brings the theme music down, she says, in a slightly breathless but confident voice:

How are we tonight? How is everyone feeling? The lights on my phone tell me there are some problems, some sadness or misunderstanding. It feels like a good night to banish some of those troubles, to start down the path toward self-realization. Self-intimacy. Because the better we understand ourselves and what gives us pleasure, the better we can pass that pleasure on to others.

[Pause. Sips coffee]

Ronnie’s in a fine mood tonight, friends. Ronnie feels like anything could be possible tonight. She’s dying to hear your voices. But before we begin, I’d like to pass on a general suggestion, a small idea that might spark the senses a little. Maybe heat things up. When the show finishes tonight and you’re still wide awake and wondering what to do, give the great outdoors a try. I’m serious now, all right? We’ve got such gorgeous weather lately. Get outside. At night. Find a secluded park. Find a wooded grove. Bring your partner and dance. Tango, maybe. Under the stars, in the moonlight. I know.

[Deep breath]

Sounds a little retro, a little kitschy. Little Doris Dayish. Sure. But trust me, ten minutes with the breeze moving in your hair and the sound of the leaves blowing past your feet … it’s different. Anything can happen. The moon goes to work on the blood, you know. Try a little slow dance out in the night. See where it leads. Call me. Let me know.

[Pause]

Now, on to our first call. Hello, Carlo, you’re with Ronnie. Relax and talk to me. My assistant tells me you’ve been having some bad dreams lately.

Flynn stares at her back and listens to the caller relay a nightmare of snapping, foaming Dobermans surrounding his naked body. It’s an awful image and the person on the phone is articulate enough to make it detailed and vivid. The voice chokes up a little once or twice, but Ronnie has a knack for calming and reassuring. She leads the caller through to the end of the nightmare and then gently starts to probe for its cause, the real reason this man has called.

And as Flynn stares at her back, the slope of her shoulders, the mild sheen of light off her hair, he starts to think that possibly a turning point has already been reached, that the days ahead may have little resemblance to the ones past. The idea of this not only excites him but fills him with a kind of distracting pulse, a wave of energy that feels like a benign, enervating tension running down his spine. It makes him feel like he has to move, do something to release pressure.

So he gets off his stool and walks up to her, puts his hands on her shoulders, and starts a slow rubdown. For a second, he flinches, wondering if he’s done something wrong that might disrupt the broadcast. But Ronnie’s a pro. She places one of her hands over one of his and never stops talking.

Flynn leans down and kisses the top of her head and takes in the smell of coconut. Then he pulls away and walks out of the booth.

Wayne looks up from the board, startled, maybe even a little frightened. Flynn tries to put him at ease with a smile and a hands-in-his-pocket shuffle.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” he says.

Wayne shakes his head too fast. “Once enough calls are lined up, the rest is cake. Ronnie does her own carts. I just keep an eye out for problems.”

“G.T. Flynn,” Flynn says, sticking a hand out and nodding.

Wayne shakes his hand and doesn’t think to offer his own name. Instead he says, “You known Ronnie long?”

“Not too long, though I’ve been a listener from the start.”

“Ever call in?”

Flynn smiles. “No, but I probably wouldn’t tell you if I had.”

“Oh yeah,” is all Wayne can think of to say. “Right.”

The guy’s got some feelings for Ronnie, Flynn thinks. The poor bastard has to work with her every night and will never give any indication, any sign of attraction or desire. He’s probably furious that I’m here tonight.

“Ronnie was telling me …” Flynn starts, looking down at the board, appearing to study the banks of knobs and sliders and meters.

“Yeah?”

“She was saying how it usually goes during the show. How you two operate. Quite a team, huh?”

Wayne likes to hear this. He’ll remember the exact words. He says, “We’re pretty good. We work well together.”

“You can tell,” Flynn says, nodding and pulling down the corners of his mouth. “You can see the rhythm. That’s why I had to come down here tonight. I didn’t want to get in the way or anything, but I really wanted to see you two do it. After listening for so long. I’d hear her mention your name all the time. I always wondered what you two looked like.”

“Now you know.”

“Yeah. Now I know,” Flynn repeats. “Tell me, is it always so natural? I mean between the announcer and the engineer. I mean, you two seem like you could do this with your eyes closed.”

“Well, we’re pretty good. Not everyone—”

“I mean does every night go this smooth? All the calls lined up, all the ads timed right.”

“Well, we—”

“And when do you go out for the food?”

Wayne just stares at him, then finally says, “The food?”

Flynn smiles. “Yeah. Ronnie was telling me how the night goes and she was saying you know all the great takeout places. Chinese. Mexican. You can get them to hang around after closing till you pick up. She called you the King of Takeout.”

“Oh yeah? The King of Takeout?”

“Yeah. I thought that was great. So, when do you go? ’Cause I insist, no argument now — I want to treat you two tonight. This is on me.”

Wayne stares at him a little bewildered, then says, “Well, we really didn’t discuss—”

Flynn cuts him off. “Ronnie said she was dying for some Tandoori. That Indian place down San Remo Ave—”

“She wanted Indian? We’ve never gotten—”

But Flynn has already pulled a fifty from his pants pocket and is tucking it into Wayne’s hand.

“Yeah, we were driving down here tonight and she started going on about how she could go for some biryani and some Tandoori shrimp.”

He puts an arm around Wayne’s shoulder and starts to steer him toward the door.

“Usually we wait until—” Wayne begins, but Flynn talks him down, saying, “Looks like everything is under control here. All the lines are lit. You take your time, we’ll be fine. And you know, if you could find a bottle of wine, your choice, that would be great.”

Wayne stares at him, bewildered and cowed.

Flynn chucks him under the chin, gives him a small push out into the corridor, winks, and says, “I think there’s a liquor store over on Seventh that stays open till midnight.”

26

Hazel and Eddie do a sweep around the block, then ease the van over the curbing and drive down a gravel and weed slope into the burned-out cavern of old Gompers Station. They drive in as far as they can and Eddie jockeys the van behind the remains of the marble stairway where it can’t be seen from the street.

In its day, in the twenties and thirties, Gompers Station was Quinsigamond’s answer to Grand Central. For decades it was the second largest train station in the state, a depot for every major line that passed through New England. Survivors from that era will tell you it had style. And a deceiving sense of permanence.

When the Gompers was opened in 1911, the public was let into a holy palace of the high industrial age: From atop a heavy granite base rose a white marble basilica consecrated to the religion of fast travel. Two symmetrical baroque towers shot up two hundred feet from street level. One hundred and sixty Ionic columns trimmed the exterior walls. The main waiting room was an elliptical vault that contained eighteen thousand square feet of space, capped by a domed ceiling in gilt frames.

Sometime after World War II, the railroads began the steady decline that led to the downfall of Gompers Station. By the early seventies, the last freight company pulled out and the worst of the erosion got under way. Anything of value was drilled or blasted out of place and carted away, and once the main ceiling was destroyed, the Quinsigamond winters began to go to work.

It might have been better if the station had been leveled and remanded to memory and museum photos, eternally new and forever whole. Instead, the place was left to rot into a bizarre modern ruin on the northeast corner of downtown. It looks like a chillingly realistic vision of a postnuclear landscape. The original flooring is gone, leaving uneven bedrock and gravelly dirt. Massive chunks of granite and marble are missing from the walls. The master stairway that led to the upper-level dining pavilion is more a gritty, crater-filled incline than anything else. The Ionic columns are crumbled and broken, and in some cases, lying on their sides. Indistinguishable rubble is strewn everywhere and the air is thick with grime and soot.

During the coldest months of the year, Gompers is an atom-smashed boardinghouse for dozens of homeless vagrants and drunks. From time to time it becomes popular with the growing pack of mental health cases deinstitutionalized from the Toth Care Facility. There are rumors that a group of wandering satanists celebrate Black Mass here on the Solstice.

And occasionally, like tonight, Gompers Station is a neutral meeting ground for gang rites and summits and unconventional transactions.

Eddie reaches for his door handle and Hazel shakes her head without looking at him. She’s got a brown paper super-market bag in her lap and her hands are inside it counting the money.

“No one tell you the days of big debt are over?” Eddie says, pleased with himself.

Hazel keeps counting and mouths the words Shut up, ass-hole.

Eddie ignores her. “What if they don’t show?”

There’s a second of quiet while Hazel finishes the tally, then she looks across at him and says, “They don’t show up, we blow it all on smack and tattoos.”

Eddie loves it when she talks like this. If he thought there was even a small chance of his meaning more to Hazel than muscle and handiwork, he’d drop Diane and steal a ring tomorrow.

“Who are we into for the wad?” he asks.

“This isn’t we,” Hazel says, emphasizing the last word. Then she continues, “I went to Elmore. And this dyke painter I know who’s getting lucky at the Baldwin Gallery.”

Eddie waits a beat, then can’t help himself. “You go to Flynn?”

“No, I didn’t go to Flynn,” Hazel says, getting angry. “How the fuck could I go to Flynn? Use your goddamn brain for once.”

“How do I know?” Eddie says, defensive. “You could tell him anything. You could say—”

“I don’t lie to Flynn,” Hazel says, almost yelling. Then she remembers where they are and forces some control.

“Look,” she says, “we’ve got to do this clean. Okay? This is partly a small test, allright? We put up the coin, we take the merchandise, we glance, we just glance, okay, at the merchandise. And then we’re out of here. We clear on that? No talk. No extra words. No ‘goodbye, see you soon’ crap. Okay?”

Eddie squints at her like he’s insulted. He’s about to tell her to save the instructions for the lightweights she’s drafted, but then a knock sounds on Hazel’s door and they both start in their seats.

“Shit,” Eddie whispers. “I didn’t even see the bastards come in.”

Hazel mouths Shut the fuck up and pulls up on her door handle. They climb out of the van and Eddie comes around the back to stand behind her. There are three Hyenas, one out front and two others about two yards behind him. The front man is Loke and he’s holding a small nylon duffel bag down by his side.

Hazel steps forward and hands him the grocery sack. He doesn’t say a word. He simply nods and tosses the sack at the feet of one of his backup men, who picks it up and holds it under his arm.

“Not going to count it?” Hazel asks.

Loke shakes his head and tosses her the duffel. She follows his example by turning and handing it over to Eddie, who hefts it in his hand and seems to debate its weight.

No one says a word and Eddie moves to leave, but Hazel clears her throat suddenly and reaches into the pocket of her jeans. She hears a quick crush of gravel and looks up to see one of Loke’s men has gone into a semicrouch and has a bead on her with a snub-barrel.38.

She hears Eddie whisper “Shit” and she stops moving, then slowly, with exaggerated care, she draws out a brass money clip with some bills pinched in it. Everyone stays rigid. There’s a tension in the moment that’s manifested in the lack of motion and the sound of Eddie’s breath.

“I had asked you,” Hazel says, “about another item.” She extends the money clip out in the air toward Loke.

He stares at it for a while, then makes a quick hand gesture and his backup comes upright and stows his piece back wherever he drew it from. Loke reaches around to the rear waistband of his pants and brings forward his own handgun, a.44 automatic.

He shifts the gun in his hand and holds it out to Hazel grip-first. She takes the gun without looking at it and extends the money clip.

Loke shakes his head.

“I want you to have that,” he says in a whispery voice. “It’s a gift. Instead of roses.”

Hazel opens her mouth, hesitates, then closes it again. She stares at Loke and pushes the clip back into her pocket, then she nods and starts to move for the van. Eddie follows her, climbs in behind the wheel, cranks the engine, and rolls the van back a few yards.

Hazel passes the gun from hand to hand, getting a feel for it, enjoying the coolness of the plating against her skin. When she turns to look out the window, Loke and his men are gone.

It’s not until they’re three blocks from Gompers Station that Eddie finally breaks the silence and says, “What the fuck is that for?”

Hazel’s face stays expressionless, but she gives a small shake of her head like she’s disappointed.

“We’re in the Park now, Eddie,” she says. “We’re in Bangkok now.”

They’re quiet for another block and then Eddie says, “You gonna start popping liquor stores or something?”

They swing up an entrance ramp of the interstate. Hazel sighs and stares out at the lights of the oncoming cars. After a while she says, “No. No liquor stores, Eddie. You know, you’re a sweetheart, but you got no feel for symbolism.”

27

Flynn watches Wayne standing before the glass elevator, staring up at the floor numbers, probably unaware of the fifty-dollar bill still crumpled in his fist.

Ronnie slides an ad cart into its slot and lowers the volume on a voice excited by a Volvo sale. She slides the headphones to her neck, swivels to face Flynn, and asks, “What the hell happened to Wayne?”

Flynn shrugs and says, “Sudden yearning for Tandoori. But don’t worry, he said he’d bring back enough for all of us.”

She squints at him and holds back a smile, and he says, “How long’s the ad?”

“Not long enough.”

He walks to her, swivels her back until she’s facing the board, and begins to run his hands through her hair, then drops them down and starts in on her shoulders again. After a moment, he comes over the slopes of the shoulders and starts to unfasten the top button of her blouse.

“No way,” she says. “I’m on in thirty seconds.”

“Might take longer than that,” he whispers, sliding a hand inside the blouse and fingering a nipple over the camisole. He can feel her lungs bring in air. She reaches up and back, touches the side of his face with her hand. The ad voice says, “… prices do not reflect dealer prep or tax,” and without removing Flynn’s hand, Ronnie leans forward, pulls the headphones back on, adjusts a volume knob, hits a button, and says, “Hello, caller from southern New Hampshire, you’re on Libido Liveline, confide in Ronnie.”

She gives no indication that anything unusual is happening. Flynn knew she’d be all control and it makes him want to push things further, make it a harder test. He switches to her left breast, this time sliding his fingers inside the camisole and squeezing a bit, leaning his head down at the same time to kiss her neck. Her head moves abruptly, but he’s not convinced she wants him to stop.

Yes, hello. I’m a first-time caller.

Thank you. Thank you very much. For calling.

Flynn brings his tongue out and tastes her neck. The sharp, lingering sting of her perfume surprises him as much as the sudden change in her voice. He thinks she sounds like some female version of Elvis.

I’m not sure exactly how to start here. I’m just not … I’ve heard you in the past, you know, discuss my, discuss the type of problem I’m—

You’re nonorgasmic, correct? This is what you told my assistant? You’re not able to achieve orgasm?

The caller doesn’t respond at first and Flynn thinks she might be a little put off by Ronnie’s interruption and the abrupt manner she’s taking. He agrees that it isn’t her normal procedure and he wonders if his tongue and lips and hands are at all responsible. He hopes so and undoes another button on the blouse.

Are you still there, caller? Hello?

I’m here. I’m listening.

Have I identified your problem?

[Pause] Yes. You’re correct.

All right, then, let’s go to work. Now, I have to ask you a series of questions, and I need to know, before we get going here, if you’re going to have difficulty answering. Because, as you can imagine, these are questions of a fairly intimate nature and I’m getting the sense that you’re a bit apprehensive about being on the air.

Flynn pushes both his hands down inside her shirt, begins to squeeze both breasts and at the same time massage each nipple with his thumbs. Under the board, Ronnie kicks off her shoes.

It’s just that, I’ve listened before and I never—

My manner surprised you. You thought I was abrupt with you. And I was. What you have to understand is that I don’t have the luxury here of spending an hour with you, face-to-face, one-on-one, taking months to learn the personal history, to become versed in the childhood, review the traumas, hear all the details about the choice of lovers.

Yes, I understand.

I have to operate on instinct and the nature of the problem and the tone of the voice in my headphones. And I’m limited on time. Now, in the past you may have heard me take a more patient tack with another caller. But I’m sure we were dealing with a different problem. And certainly with a different person, correct?

Yes, yes, of course.

He brings his hands out and starts to unfasten all the buttons. He pulls the blouse out of the skirt and opens it wide, showing the silk, cream-colored teddy below.

Now, I’m going to need complete honesty from you if you want to accomplish anything tonight. And I’m going to need you to believe that, in fact, this one call, this next ten or fifteen minutes of talk, could change a very important part of your life. I’m asking for a good deal of faith on your part. Okay?

Yes, okay, I’m ready.

He pulls the tail of the camisole out of the skirt and when it snags for a second, he wonders if it’s the kind that extends and snaps at the crotch. But Ronnie gives him a hand, shifting in her seat and pulling the hem free at her waist.

Let me start by asking you, is this a lifelong problem? Have you ever reached orgasm at any time in the past?

Well, you see, I’m not really sure. I don’t—

Okay, fine, go no further. That’s not a problem. Can you tell me, have you ever attempted self-stimulation? Have you ever tried to reach orgasm manually? [Silence] Come on now. Either with your hand or with a vibrator?

No. No, I haven’t.

Flynn starts to roll the camisole upward, forcing himself to go slowly. When he comes to the bottom fold of her breast he tugs it in toward her body and pulls up even slower so she’ll feel the silk rubbing past her nipples.

I sense that you have some reservations about attempting this?

It’s just … I’m somewhat modest …

We’re talking about the privacy of your own home. Close your shades. Turn on your answering machine.

I know what you’re saying but I …

You’ve got to relax, learn to be more comfortable with your own body. Can I make some suggestions? Will you promise me you’ll give them some thought?

He slides her chair back from the board just a bit and swivels it to the right. He starts to walk around to the side and can’t help looking out the plate-glass window. The mall corridor is empty, but he wonders what will happen if Wayne changes his mind halfway to the Himalaya Express and returns. He’s surprised to find the thought excites him a little.

Go ahead. I’m listening.

I don’t hear a lot of commitment in your voice.

It’s just awkward. You don’t—

Yes, I do, my friend. You have no idea. Listen to me now. It’s awkward at first, possibly, but you’ll be shocked at how quickly your body will respond. Remember, you called here for a reason. The alternative is much more awkward. And more painful. Your subconscious is yearning for this change. You owe this to yourself. Doesn’t it bother you, doesn’t it drive you crazy, that there are feelings that you know exist and you know are tremendously powerful and yet you can’t get to them? You can’t ignite them. You don’t know where to begin.

I don’t—

No, you don’t. And that’s why you called. And that’s what I’m here to give you tonight.

He goes down on his knees, reverent as an altar boy. He leans his torso into her, at first just laying his head sideways against her breasts, feeling the surprising coolness of her skin on his cheek. And then after just a second or two, he turns and brings his mouth to a breast, tongues the nipple a few times, very slowly, achingly slowly, time slowed down to an almost-frozen edging. Then he closes his mouth and starts to suck. He can see her chest rise and he knows how hard she’s trying to stay in control. Then he closes his eyes and lodges in a rhythmic draw.

[Breath audible] Listen, tonight, before you go to sleep, I want you to put on some music. Forget the TV tonight. Put on something soft. Lush. You know what I mean. Something sensuous. You know what will work for you. Whether you think you do or not, trust me. You know. And if you have any wine in the house, I want you to pour yourself a cool glass of wine, maybe a nice merlot, that would be good. [Deep breath] Then I want you to draw a bath, fairly hot. And I want you to add some bath oil to the water. I want you to get some candles if you have any in. And I want you to place them around the tub and light them. Keep the regular lights off, okay? Understand? And leave some talcum out on the vanity if you think of it.

He switches to the other breast without opening his eyes. He kisses the skin between them as he moves. The skirt she’s wearing zips up the side.

Now I want you to start to get undressed. But I want you to do it before the mirror, with the candlelight reflecting behind you. This might be difficult for you, but it’s essential that you go slow and watch yourself. I need you to keep your eyes on yourself, keep your eyes on your body as it appears in the mirror. And tell yourself it’s good, it’s fine, you approve. Say the words aloud if you have to. Whisper them. Convince yourself if you’re a doubter. Assure yourself. Compliment yourself. Let your clothing just drop to the floor. I don’t want you to even think about it right now.

He starts to draw down the zipper and has to slide his hand under her and lift her slightly off the chair. She suddenly surprises him by reaching down and bringing her hand up into his crotch. He almost makes a noise, but stops in time, hunches inward, and stifles himself.

Now I need you to step into the water. Feel its warmth surround your legs. Feel the steaminess, the slickness of the water. Go down into it slowly, feel it lap up against your buttocks, then slide down, let it cover you totally, let it wash over you, come up over your sides and cover your belly and come up around your breasts. Can you picture what I’m saying to you?

Yes. Absolutely.

You and about fifty thousand listeners, Flynn thinks. He swivels the chair so she’s lined up directly in front of him.

Do you know what I want you to do now?

Yes, I do.

He puts his hands on each of her knees. Her legs are already spread apart, but he pushes them outward till they touch the arms of the chair. She places her hand on his arm and he can’t tell if it’s a signal to stop or to keep going.

Okay, let’s say it. I need you to touch yourself. Can you say it?

Touch myself.

Stimulate yourself. Arouse yourself. Love yourself.

Arouse.

That’s right. You know what I’m saying here.

She’s squeezing his arm, applying a tremendous amount of pressure. He suddenly realizes how strong she is. But he has no idea what she wants him to do. And he hesitates, does nothing.

[Deep breath] The big question is, can you do it?

So she takes control and starts to push his hand upward under the skirt. She guides him to the center and she’s already wet and now the hesitation is gone and he knows what to do. He looks up and her shoulders are moving slightly up and down and she bites her bottom lip and releases it. He wants her to finish with the caller, go to an ad, get off the air. But it’s clear that’s not what she wants. He knows she wants to stay on the air to the end.

Yes, I can. I think I can.

You know you can.

Can they hear her? Does every listener know what’s going on here? Is Wayne in his car, weeping, pounding the dash with the fist that holds the food money?

You do what I say now. Tonight.

Her voice is urgent and her words are interrupted slightly by grabs for air. It seems so obvious to Flynn. She’s grabbing the arms of her chair and her knuckles are going white. He rotates his hand for better position.

I want to thank you—

You just do what I say. Promise me—

I do, I promise—

Then good luck, and we move on to our next caller.

Flynn looks up at her shocked, but he doesn’t stop. He wants her to grab an ad cart and jam it in, fill up the studio with the promise of sales from the raspy language of pitchmen. But that’s just not going to happen. She pulls a hand off the chair arm, punches down on a board button, brings her hand back to his head, and grabs a fistful of his hair.

Yes. You’re on Libido Liveline.

She’s overly loud and there’s a catch to her voice at the end of her words as if she’d just emerged from below water.

Yes, Ronnie. Tremendous show tonight. A real classic.

He waits, but there’s silence, so he stops and she yanks on his hair and then speaks.

Yes. Your question.

Is everything all right? Is there a problem?

Flynn begins to withdraw his hand and she shakes her head, both her lips pulled into her mouth. He makes a head gesture to the microphone and she nods rapidly, then unclenches her teeth and leans forward.

Not at all. Do you have a question?

I’m a first-time caller, Ronnie. First-time caller, but a longtime admirer.

[Pause] Thank you. And your question?

Flynn moves his hand to her thigh and leaves it there, motionless.

Well, it’s more a comment than a question. A warning,’ you might say.

A warning?

Yes, that’s right. I know your show is very popular among the Wireless crowd.

At the mention of the bar, Flynn straightens up slightly and turns his head to stare at the flashing lights of the board.

And I’ve got a feeling those O’Zebedee Brothers might be fans of yours also. And I feel a need to be open here, to inform the whole miserable cult of bastards of my intentions.

There’s a minute of dead air as Ronnie catches her breath and stares down at Flynn. Then,

Ronnie, you there? Hello?

I’m afraid, sir, you’ve called the wrong show. We’re here to discuss human sexuality. That’s our topic here. I think maybe you want Ray Todd’s—

They know who I’m talking to. They’ve been warned. The joke is over, okay? They’re screwed. I’m in town and I won’t be leaving till the job is done. They know what I mean.

I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong show, caller. I’m going to have to cut you off now—

I am in town, you little bastards. I know who you are—

She reaches out and kills the line.

We’ll be right back after these messages.

She jams home a cart, and an announcement for a bluegrass festival starts up.

“Why did you stop?” she says, head back, looking up at the ceiling.

“You were losing it. You couldn’t speak.”

“You shouldn’t have stopped,” she says.

He doesn’t know what to do. He feels foolish and inept. He starts to say, “I could still—”

But she cuts him off, smiles down at him, and removes his hand.

“I don’t think so,” she says.

She swivels until her back is to the board and then starts to get dressed.

“I don’t get it,” he says.

She tucks the last of her blouse into her skirt and says, “Relax. Food’s here.”

And he turns to see the doors of the glass elevator closing behind Wayne. The engineer starts to walk slowly toward the studio. He’s got a brown paper bag in his arms. It’s gone wet and dark near the bottom.

Ronnie stands up and runs her hands through her hair. She gives Flynn a soft punch to the shoulder.

“Better luck next time,” she says. “God, I hope he brought some curried beef.”

28

Speer cuts the engine of the Ford and slouches a bit in his seat, but it’s no longer possible to fall into the comfort of a standard surveillance posture. So he tries to ignore his twitching muscles and the rhythmic ache that pulses through his temples. He tries to concentrate instead on the landscape.

The Goulden Ave whores are smoking dusted joints, trading stories about the kink of the week and generally hanging out, waiting, squeezed into their Lycra and spandex, maybe mildly hoping for that one mythical all-night john who’ll pop for a room in the Penumbra and a bottle of Johnnie Walker. There are probably thirty to forty of them spread down the two blocks of Goulden between Granada and Grassman, but there’s one core group, a semilegendary clique of hustlers that congregate around the entrance of the Hotel Penumbra. They’re sometimes called “the best and the brightest” by the bachelor-party yuppies who cruise in from the suburbs.

Just a year ago, the Penumbra was an improbable but absolutely gorgeous piece of work, a hundred-year-old, five-story arc that served as preposterous crib for Cortez, onetime neighborhood mayor for the Latinos. Cortez dumped an enormous percentage of his income into mutating the hotel into a surreal vision that spliced elements of spooky High Gothic with splashes of Euro-industrial. It never should have worked, but Cortez willed it into being and shined a barrage of klieg lights on it so the city had to look.

Then Cortez disappeared. And the vision that took ten years to refine toward perfection took only twelve brutal months to decay into a darkened hulk of looted rooms, graffitied walls, and burned-out floors. No one knows for sure who owns the Penumbra today, though it’s possible the city has been saddled with it. But in the absence of a resident landlord, a pimp named Bedoya has taken to renting out the uncharred rooms by the hour.

Speer grips the steering wheel, sweating, habitually moistening his lips and gums, wondering if the dozen women loitering in front of Cortez’s desecrated monument realize the fierceness of this devolution, if they understand it as a simple and beautiful example of eternal laws, not the humanist babble about survival and extinction, but the most ancient stories, tales concerned with the expulsion of the unworthy, vignettes about vile, unfit creatures being cast downward.

He takes his notebook from the passenger seat, opens it, rereads the last few lines of rigid print, then picks up his pen and continues writing.

(Goulden Avenue)

My life continues, Margie. I’m involved in the meat of one of my most annoying investigations. You would say I found them all annoying and that I loved the annoyance. (Maybe in the same way that I used to love the static, what you thought to be blank noise, undefined, incapable of being interpreted.) I don’t disagree with you out of hand. I’m just not sure “love” is the correct word in this instance. Rather, I would say that I am compelled to view “annoyance” as an opponent of complacency. Complacency can be equated with weakness. And weakness will always lead to disorder, confusion, an irreversible breakdown of progress and history.

In this vein, I’d like to attempt to explain my attention to seemingly meaningless static. Though I am still making progress in Dr. Helm’s book (though, to be honest with you, I am having trouble accepting his contention that it is the repression of a “female sensibility,” trapped, hidden, and degraded in every male, that is the cause for everything from harsh words to Cambodian genocide …), I took a look, yesterday, into another tome from the self-help library you had abandoned in our home. I happened to scavenge Dr. Rothstein’s Death Takes No Holiday before moving to my current residence. The doctor goes in for the popular notion that casts Anger as one rung on the inevitable ladder up to an acceptance of Death as a natural (and constantly imminent) state.

Possibly, this is where we differed the most, Margie. I continue to see my anger as an assault on death, an affront to its peasant (communistic) power. And even if I’m forced to admit that, at some point, my defeat (and Death’s victory) is certain, I still have the comfort of the knowledge that I did not bow down to a foe I cannot respect.

A pain begins behind his left eye. He rubs a hand over his face, takes some deep breaths, then slides the notebook and pen under his seat and looks down Goulden Ave. He fixes on a dark-skinned girl, maybe seventeen. He watches her bend down to the window of a slowing low-rider and begin a full-bodied negotiation, a form of barter where suggestion is everything. And the ease of her movements and gestures, the lascivious way she runs her hand along the side of her own breast, tells him yes, these women may be the best and the brightest, but they haven’t got a clue that there’s a ton of granite metaphor easily within their grasp, waiting to be noticed and understood. Cortez’s barren empire of signs flanking their backsides might as well be Notre Dame or Chartres.

Still, he’s not without some degree of sympathy for these women. They’re animals of commerce and at the very least he can understand the rules that drive their lives. There’s an obscene order to their motivations and actions, a primal, logical capitalism played out in a carnal market. And the fact is they never had the benefit of a Sister Bernadette, Speer’s first-grade teacher, with her rosary beads cloaked inside the flowing black habit and transformed in an unseen instant into a flailing whip, a blessed lash that could beat the commandments forever into a still-forming skull.

He leans forward and pops the glove box and for a second he stops and stares at his hand lit in the dim green glow that emits from the band selector of the dash radio. His skin looks gray and then almost translucent, as if, if he continued to stare, he’d see through the skin to the muscle and bone below. He blinks his eyes and pulls from the box a pint of Four Roses and a warm can of Jolt. He pops open the soda and takes a long drink, wedges it in his crotch, twists off the top of the bourbon, and throws down a shooter’s swallow.

The radio is tuned between stations, and the car is filled with a low, consistent hiss of static. Speer has no idea what time it is. On the drive to Goulden Ave, on impulse, he pulled up next to a sewer grating, unstrapped his Bulova — the one Margie gave him, inscribed All My Love Always—and dropped it down through the slot into a pool beneath the street. He’s not sure why he did this. He could argue with himself that it was a symbolic attempt to begin to move on, to eliminate reminders of his wife, of the woman he long ago invested his soul with. But the truth is he has no desire to forget Margie. To stop writing the letters. To abandon his plans for reconstructing their life together.

There’s a small silver crucifix dangling from the rearview mirror in the center of the windshield. Speer lifts his hand to it, recoils his index finger, then tweaks the cross lightly. It begins to sway back and forth through his line of vision like a pendulum, and with each arc Speer shifts his field of focus from the dying Christ to the clan of whores jabbering a hundred yards away. The process makes his head ache worse, but he keeps it up for a time, and then, without really thinking, he begins to recite a Bible verse drilled into him long ago by Sister Bernadette, words pushed down into the densest meat of his brain, where they could never evaporate.

Do not defile yourself by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am casting out before you defiled themselves; and the land became defiled, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants …

The words trail off, but he continues to move his lips for a while, a silent babble, an inaudible glossolalia, as if a mute tongue of purging fire had visited this Ford sedan parked at the side of Goulden Ave. When he finally brings his lips together, he restarts the car’s engine and begins to roll toward the Penumbra.

Steam is rising from the sewer gratings along Goulden and it combines with a low layer of damp fog to give the whole street. a different look, as if the block had been lifted out of Quinsigamond and transported to Berlin in 1931, all shadow and harsh electrical light against red brick and iron beams and whining, distant police sirens chronically sounding in the distance.

Mina is the first to approach Speer’s car. She’s small and a little wiry, dressed in a red vinyl miniskirt, sheer black stockings with a polka-dot design woven in, a shiny, royal-blue halter top under a ratty imitation-fur shoulder wrap. Her hair is a weird retro shag cut with the last traces of a burnt-red dye job growing out. She moves across the sidewalk at a slow pace, a true saunter, to the accompaniment of accented calls from her colleagues. Speer picks up a mention of señorito blanquito. He slides the passenger window down all the way and as Mina leans down on the door and smiles, he toasts her with his pint and says, “The kingdom of heaven approaches.”

“Your lucky night,” Mina says. “This kingdom has the discount for un policía.”

Speer doesn’t even try to protest.

“I’m off duty and very lonely,” he says in a low and awkward voice, feeling a run of sweat slide down the middle of his back.

“Let’s see how lonely,” she says, rubbing her thumb and forefinger together in the classic cash sign and looking backward over her shoulder at the sisters who continue to hoot and laugh and sing.

Speer slides a wad of bills up slightly from his breast pocket and Mina says, “You have a date for the prom, policía,” and climbs in the car next to him.

They enter the basement apartment and Speer flips on a light, then goes to the folding table and turns on the radio. As the sound of static plays from the speaker, he moves back to the door, locks the bolt, and secures the slide chain. Mina tosses her throw over the stool, walks to the tiny rectangular window in the far corner of the room, up near the ceiling, and says, “You get water in here?”

Speer ignores her, takes off his suitcoat, and throws it on the wicker rocking chair. He goes to the single kitchen cabinet, pulls down an unlabeled bottle, and begins pouring what looks like bourbon into a white coffee mug that says One Day at a Time. Mina walks over to the radio and begins to spin the tuner, looking for some music.

Speer wheels around immediately and says, “Don’t touch the radio,” in a flat, slow voice that makes Mina squint at him. He walks to the table and readjusts the tuner until the room is filled with static again.

“What are you doing?” Mina says. “This gives me the headache.”

Speer cups her chin in his hands, tries to smile, and says, “Five minutes, you won’t notice it.”

As if this is some sort of cue, Mina steps into him, brings her mouth up to his neck, and begins to unbuckle his belt. Speer jerks away, but Mina’s persistent, following the flow of his body, trying to unlatch the belt as she says, “It’s okay, papacito. Mina take good care of you.”

Speer gets his hands on her shoulders and holds her still, but he’s breathing heavy and he stammers as he says, “Now, you slow down. You slow down and we’ll do this right.”

He takes a long breath, then moves over to the bed, gets down on one knee, reaches underneath, and pulls out a worn and crumpled brown paper shopping bag. He reaches into the bag and for some reason the crinkling, rustling noise that his hand makes bothers Mina, tenses up her stomach like a sign of the flu coming on. Speer pulls from the bag a medium-length blond wig, done in sort of a bland style with a limp curl at the ends. He holds the wig out from his body with one hand and awkwardly tries to straighten the hair with the other.

He carries the wig across the dim room as if it were a chalice, kind of reverent, maybe a little bit scared, Mina thinks. He holds it out to her as if he were giving her a gift, an engagement ring that cost a year’s salary.

“You want me to wear it?” Mina says.

Speer nods.

“You know, you could’ve just bought a blonde, saved us both the trouble.”

But she takes it from him, fits it on her head, tucking her own hair underneath. Speer puts a hand on her shoulder and steers her toward the cloudy mirror hanging over his bureau. Mina adjusts and tucks a bit, rolling her eyes the whole time, but smiling as if this could be a fun game, or at least a good story for the girls when she gets back to Goulden Ave.

Speer stands behind her the whole time, hands lightly on her shoulder, looking at her reflection with devoted attention, adjusting his stance a bit, seeming to be looking for something he hasn’t named. When Mina gets the wig as attractive as she thinks is possible, she holds her hands out at her sides for inspection. Speer nods back at her in the mirror, then turns her around, steps back, and begins to look her up and down, feet to wig and back to feet again.

“All right,” he says. “Fine.”

He takes the money from his shirt pocket and holds it up in the air for a second, eye-level, then tosses it on top of the bureau.

“What do you want me to do?” Mina asks, and follows the words with a long-practiced lick of her lips.

Speer moves around her, takes a seat in the rocker on top of his suitcoat, loosens his tie, and puts his hands down on the rocker’s arms.

“Now you stand in front of me,” he says, his voice barely audible. Mina positions herself before him.

“Now,” he says, “you get those whore’s clothes off you.”

She nods, slides out of her heels, then, slowly, arching her body side to side, she begins to pull her top off over her head, saying, “You gonna love what Mina’s got for you.”

“No,” Speer barks, surprising them both. Mina holds the loose halter against her chest for a second, then Speer starts rocking slowly, lowers his voice, and says, “Don’t use that name. In this room, your name is Margie.”

Mina nods and Speer says, “Say it.”

“My name is Margie.”

“Say it again.”

Mina sighs a bit, but complies. “My name is Margie.”

“All right,” Speer says, “keep going.”

She drops the halter to the ground, reaches around behind, and unzips the skirt, then pushes it down her legs. She unsnaps the garters on her thighs and does a very slow roll-down of the stockings. She can hear Speer’s breathing get heavier and she sees him shift slightly in his seat. She bunches up one stocking and throws it into Speer’s lap.

“I don’t want that,” he says, his voice a bit high, but there’s no conviction in the words and he leaves the stocking where it’s fallen.

Mina puts her hands on her hips, turns her waist slightly side to side, showing the customer all the vantages, letting him take in and cement the memories he’ll call up weeks and months from now.

Speer repositions his feet and stops the rocker from moving. The only sound in the musty room is the dry catch of his swallow over the low static of the radio.

“Lie down on the bed,” he says, and Mina smiles at him and stretches out on her side, her elbow bent and her arm propping her head as she looks at him.

“Lie on your back,” he whispers, and she obeys.

He continues to sit in the rocker staring at her as she stares up at the ceiling.

“Close your eyes,” he says, and she turns her head and glances at him, then heeds his request.

There’s nothing but static for a full minute, then Mina hears the creak of the chair as he stands, but she keeps her eyes closed. The ritual Johns will freak if you screw up the program at a crucial moment. But then they pay well when you follow the directions exactly. All in all, it balances out.

From across the room, she hears him say, “I’m very tired tonight, Margie. Do you have to hear the story again?”

She doesn’t know what to do. She’s not sure he wants her to speak. And if he does, she’s not sure what the answer should be. So she says nothing, stays prone with her eyes squeezed shut.

Then he whispers, “Please tell me the story,” the words muffled as if he were trying to keep his lips from moving, a bad ventriloquist or a kid cheating on a school exam.

“Please tell me the story,” she repeats, and can tell immediately she’s done the right thing, her instincts are on target.

She hears the sound of a zipper being opened.

“But Margie,” he says softly, “you have no idea the day I’ve had, the things I’ve witnessed out there.”

“I want to hear the story,” she demands, her voice bolder, more adamant.

And as if her tone has energized him, she hears the rapid fumbling of clothes being shed, coins falling from pockets and clanging on the linoleum floor.

“Please, Margie,” but his voice is already resigned, “I just want to lie down next to you. I just want to hold you and sleep.”

“You tell it to me right now,” she snaps, feeling in charge and liking it, sure he’ll capitulate to any request.

He comes to the side of the bed, strokes her cheek gently, takes her by the wrist. Then she feels the coolness of the metal and at the same time hears the ratcheted-click sound and opens her eyes in time to see him securing the other end of the handcuff to the frame of the bed.

“What the fuck,” she yells, and jerks her arm away, but she’s already locked in. With her free hand she takes a futile swing at him, but he sidesteps it and holds a finger up to his mouth, saying, “Quiet down, Margie. Right now.”

Mina shakes her head at him, controls herself enough to say, “I don’t do this shit, asshole. You want this shit, you go down Hip Sing Street. Everyone knows that.”

He’s naked from the waist down, but he’s still got his starched white shirt on and his tie is still pulled up to his throat. He’s smiling and nodding, saying, “Relax, Margie. You’ve done this before. This is not a problem.”

“Take this thing off or I’ll start screaming—”

“Margie—”

“I mean it, asshole. Get it off now.”

He holds the key up in the air for her to see and says, “Please, Margie. I’ll let you go anytime you want. You know that. But I’ll pay you double your rate if you relax and stay. I always have. I’m a man of my word.”

He suddenly doesn’t seem very dangerous to Mina, just an intricate kink with some cash to burn.

“Let me hold the key,” she says.

He places it gently on her stomach. She picks it up and holds it in her free hand.

“I want triple time,” she says. “These things are uncomfortable.”

“My money is your money, Margie. Have I ever denied you anything?”

Mina slowly settles back on the bed and he stands over her, brushes her cheek again like a lover, and says, “Now close the eyes and ask me.”

He starts to move to the foot of the bed and Mina realizes this could be over in three short minutes, so she closes her eyes and takes a breath and says, “Tell me the story again.”

There’s a pause. He gives a dry cough and says, “If you insist—”

She interrupts and says, “I insist. Right now. I want the story. Give it to me.”

She hears him take a deep, halting breath and she spreads her legs, but he doesn’t move from his spot at the foot of the bed.

And then he begins.

“Mr. Hoover was born on January first, 1895, in Washington, D.C.”

What the hell is this shit? Mina wonders, and starts to open one eye. But Speer yells, “Don’t you dare, Margie. You asked and now you’ll have to hear the whole story. You asked for this. You did.”

With one hand, Speer is grabbing the foot bar at the end of the bed. And with the other, he’s grabbing himself.

Mina closes her eyes before she bursts out laughing. She bites down on the inside of her cheeks to keep silent and thinks, Rosalita won’t believe this.

“Mr. Hoover went to law school at night, attending George Washington University. He graduated in 1916 and went on to, to …”—there’s some hesitation, some deep breathing, then he continues—“achieve a master of law degree the following year, whereupon he entered in service to the Department of Justice as a file reviewer”—the voice speeds up just a bit—“and within two years was appointed special assistant to the then Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer. In May of 1924 he was named acting director of the Bureau of Investigation”—a pause for breath, a swallow, the pitch gets higher. “Disgusted with the scandals of the Harding administration, Mr. Hoover devised his own rigorous methods of recruiting and regimenting new personnel.” The end of the bed lifts off the floor slightly, then bangs back down, and Mina almost convulses with laughter, but manages to dig her nails into her thigh to short-circuit the attack. “Mr. Hoover established the world’s largest fingerprint file, brought practicing scientists into the world of law enforcement and built, built”— the bed lifts and bangs again—“the National Academy where,” and again the bed slams up and down, “officers from all over the country could come, come, and train and”—this is it, Mina thinks, el fin grande—“and he retained his post until his death at, his death, on May second, 1972, his death am-amid vicious rumors about his loyal and trusting, he brought order to, he brought, he saved, he ordered, hunted the agents of chaos and anarchy that, he, he …,” and the rest turns into a groaning yell and the bed is shoved back against the wall and Mina opens her eyes to see only his hand still grasping the foot bar. The rest of him is crumbled down on the floor below her eye level.

Mina shakes her head, allows herself a small giggle, and starts to unlock the handcuff. At the sound of this, Speer climbs to his feet. His face is flushed and he’s got a scowl on that tells Mina it’s time to grab her money and leave. She swings her feet over the edge of the bed and says, “Listen, next time it’s Hip Sing Street, okay? They got shit down there …”

She starts to gather her clothes together and Speer approaches her holding the One Day at a Time coffee mug and says, “I’m glad you’ve come home, Margie—”

Mina starts to pull the halter over her head and says, “Yeah, I’m glad too. Now you owe me a hundred and fifty. Let’s go.”

Speer acts as if he hasn’t heard her. “But there has to be some penance for leaving.”

Mina looks up at him and says, “Listen, dickhead, this is getting old. I’m done being Margie, okay? Now, get my money.”

“There has to be some atonement,” Speer says. “There has to be some regret. Some contrition. There must be some compunction. There has to be a balance, Margie. I’ve explained this before.”

Mina says, “Look, asshole,” and starts to stand up, but Speer shoves her back down on the bed and before she can move, he’s on top of her, straddling her and pouring the contents of the coffee mug over her head. And as she smells the gasoline, Mina begins to scream.

Speer clamps one meaty hand over her mouth and uses the other to search his shirt pocket. Mina bucks, jerks her head enough to free her mouth, and instead of screaming, bites down on Speer’s thumb, sinking teeth into skin and drawing a rush of blood. Speer screams and Mina manages to slide one leg up and rams a knee into his groin. His air cuts off and he falls sideways on the bed.

She jumps up, leaves the rest of her clothes on the floor, and is out the apartment door before Speer can get to his feet.

She runs two miles, her bare feet getting bruised and cut, through alleyways and between buildings, completely disoriented until she comes around a corner to Granada Street. She cuts down Voegelin and runs in a rear entrance to the Penumbra. She huddles inside the charred remains of Club 62, tries to catch her breath, tries to wipe the sting of the gasoline from her eyes.

She backs up against a wall, suddenly freezing in the cool November air. She squats down, hunches over her knees, thinks, I’ll get Bedoya and he’ll get the Popes and they’ll find the mother—

And then the thought breaks off, derailed by her vision of her first glance at his face behind the wheel of that boxy car. The face that told her, in that first instant, I’m a cop.

A gust of wind blows through the broken windows of the nightclub, whistles into the burned-out and gutted cavern, begins to sound, in Mina’s freezing ear, like a word. Like a name.

Margie.

29

The bath is filled with steaming hot water and a generous dose of the French raspberry oil. Hannah sits on the edge of the bathtub, naked, the bathroom door locked, Lenore’s notebook, once again, sitting in her lap like a small animal of some kind whose greatest asset is its deceptive coloration, the bland and boring outer skin that causes most predators to ignore it.

Hannah runs her hand down the spiral binding, then over the cardboard cover. It isn’t fair, Lenore, she thinks, and that’s typical of you. This is a one-way conversation. A monologue. There’s no way for me to object or maybe even agree. I don’t even know where you are. Why did you do this to me? Why did you have to choose me?

Given the chance, she wonders what she would say to Lenore.

She could just pivot, right now, right this second, turn on her behind and drop the notebook into the water. She could watch the pages start to turn to a mushy pulp, watch her mentor’s rigid printing begin to dissolve, begin to bleed into a curling stream of thin blue waves, contaminating the water with all this scrawled craziness. What if she drowned the notebook, then she stepped into the bath, slid down and let the ink-infected water engulf her body, course up around every curve and bend of her anatomy, wash over her, this full-bodied, blue-tinged baptism? What would happen? Would the madness seep into her through her pores? Would Lenore’s bent words penetrate through the skin, her lunatic worldview jump into the bloodstream and make a dash for the brain stem?

Without thinking, she opens the notebook randomly, looks down at the page, and reads:

Maybe the only reason I’m writing is to thank you for looking in on my brother. Don’t ask how I know this. It could simply be a guess.

Like my guess that I must be the central joke down the division these days, Richmond gagging himself trying to come up with the new one-liner. “Why did Lenore cross the road?” It’s all right. We always joke about things that terrify us. Things we’re too stupid to fully comprehend.

In the midst of all the mockery, I can still claim my refusal to hold an ideology. I will not be raped by anything as limiting as a belief system. Because the nature of each and every one, from the dawn of that most hazardous of realities, human consciousness, all the way through to the milliseconds in which these words are being born, is predicated on the most primal and deceptive system of them all: language. And yet, I’m still trapped within it, still bound to make the slashes and circles, the lines and dots and waves, the pathetic icons accumulated throughout the nightmare, if I want to communicate with you, H.S. Your only approach at the moment is the eye scan, your brain decoding this hash of ink and pulp.

Remember this, Hannah: that once I was the queen of rational thought. I was the Mother Superior in the order of cause and effect. I was a loving concubine for ideas of pragmatism, logic, deduction, pure reason, and free will.

And then things began to change. And the changes began to come faster, until their speed began to increase geometrically. And my faith in the supremacy of our senses began to wobble. Because I could see the limitations of these organs — the eye, ear, nose, tongue, the skin itself. And it began to appear to me that while our environment perpetually evolves around us, our capacity for perceiving it is frozen. So, we end up terrified apes on a roller coaster whose engine has revved and gone out of control and started to build to a limitless speed.

And once an understanding like this violates you, Hannah, you can never go back. You can’t help but be certain that every clove of garlic in the kitchen of Fiorello’s Ristorante has an infinite number of tastes. Every drop of cold water that slips down your neck in a late-autumn rainstorm has an infinite number of sensations. Every gust of powder that drifts past you in the shooting bunker has an infinite number of fragrances. Every tone you hear on the radio has an infinite number of components.

And every gesture you witness, from every landscape you observe, has an infinite number of meanings.

It’s like a cancer of analysis: malignant possibilities reproducing themselves without restriction.

If you’re convinced I’m psychotic, Hannah, then you should have no fear taking up this challenge: Go down to Bangkok Park and look for evidence of the gangs. Just walk around and note what you see — things like the graffiti and the tattoos. Then go home. And in an hour more signs will come to your mind — the hand signals, the footwear dangling from the streetlamps, the color of their cars.

And in two hours, more signs will come to you — the earrings their whores wear, the sources of the brand names they hang on their smack, the specific day of the week they shake down the merchants, the peculiar patterns in the bandannas they wear around their smooth shaven skulls, the placement of the knife wounds on the bodies of informants.

Guess what happens after three hours, Hannah?

How does a woman go from being a detective with a methodology, a devotion to the clue and the motive and the conclusive solution, to …

She slaps the book closed and throws it against the bathroom door. It bounces down to the floor and lies there, like a taunt, like one of Lenore’s perfect, stinging put-downs, a fast comment about cowardice or stupidity.

And finally, in that moment, Hannah realizes what she would say to Lenore. The words come to her brain without any effort or preparation. She’d say, “Go to hell, you bitch.”

She’d say, “You’re a goddamn loon. There’s nothing you can show me anymore. You’re over the top. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. And thank God, because there is no one. And it’s a relief to finally understand that. Not just in my brain, but in my heart. In my stomach, where all the real understanding has to come from. There’s no one left, Lenore. No one who could understand how badly, how desperately, I want to leave this city, how many people I’d be willing to hurt just for a chance to escape. And I have no place to escape to. No preplanned destination. No geographical goal. No resting place that I can aim for. I simply, only, want motion. Movement. Distance. From all these familiar streets and buildings and signs. From all these memorized faces. From all these voices playing over and over in my ear until I hear them in my sleep. I want distance from Quinsigamond. I want distance from my own life. From my past. All these years piling up with events and choices, decisions and random crap, until it’s such a weight on the shoulders you feel the ground giving way under your feet. You feel you’ll be pushed straight into the earth, buried alive and then buried dead by the weight of your accumulated past. I want out before this happens. I’m not as brave or smart or obsessed or committed as you, Lenore. I want out. I want movement. I want to be a solo pioneer. I want to head west, toward the next big ocean. I want to maneuver the Mustang onto a series of secondary highways, one leading into the next, roadsides painted with state boundaries and all of them blurring as I speed past. I want no more memory and I want no more prophecy. I want no news-casts or weather reports bleating from my radio. I just want to drive forward, sleep in my seat, buy fruit and crackers in anonymous convenience stores, and sit on my trunk at dusk, pulled into some overgrown field hundreds of miles from red brick, hundreds of days from my point of origin. I want to lie back and look up at the sky and not attempt to recognize and name constellations. I want some peace and I want a lifetime of quiet.”

She starts to cry now, fighting against it and failing, a burning behind the eyeballs as she hunches down over her thighs and knees, her face falling into her hands as a childish sobbing begins to catch and her breathing goes rapid and shallow.

“So I reject you, Lenore. I don’t want you. I don’t want anything to do with you. Let the fucking cock crow, Lenore. Three times. Ten times. I don’t care. I reject you. Just go away. Just leave me alone.”

30

Hazel put out the word to meet at midnight, but by eleven-thirty all her people have arrived at the old airport. They file into the abandoned terminal in groups of two and three and take their seats silently on the long-dead baggage claim conveyor belt.

Gabe has built a small campfire in the center of the semi-circle formed by the belt. The fire is not an original idea. Gabe spotted the debris of several previous fires when he first arrived. He assumes the old airport is probably used by a number of transient groups, from homeless drunks and tramps to moody, horny teenagers. He hopes none of them decide to stop by tonight, but if they do, he’s sure Hazel will handle the situation. He thinks there’s not much Hazel couldn’t handle. His walloping crush on this strange woman is growing daily.

As the group settles in around the fire, Gabe starts to think they look like a mock Indian tribe. Heavy-metal Apaches. Biker-punk Comanches. There are at least a half dozen Mohawk ’dos present, a lot of lampblack around the eyes, pounds of jagged silver jewelry — ear and nose rings and all kinds of symbolic neckwear — and tattoos. The whole crew is big on tattoos. It’s not like it’s a requirement. Hazel says there are no requirements. They just happen to share an intrinsic love of body design. So, underneath all the studded leather and torn denim is a wide variety of well-toned skin canvases exhibiting multicolored scenes of both natural and mythic art. But most of all, engraved across biceps and buttocks, are strange non sequiturs, clipped and illogical phrases, linked words and sometimes numbers whose meaning is a code known only to its bearer and his immediate circle.

There’s a rumor that Hazel wears a male name, done in scarlet ink, on the bottom slope of her left breast. No one will admit to having seen the name and there have been a few drunken guesses as to what it might be. But Gabe doesn’t believe it exists. He can picture Hazel with maybe an exploding microphone on her bottom, maybe even a standard Question authority down the back of one leg. But a man’s name on her breast? That implies a branding of sorts. It’s close to an ownership symbol and Gabe knows for certain that Hazel would have nothing to do with it.

He watches her as she sits up on the ticket counter, staring out the plate glass at the pocked runway in the moonlight. He’d love to know what she’s thinking and then begins to imagine her as a pilot, a bomber pilot, looking so sharp in one of those classic, butter-smooth black leather jackets, maybe one with the fur trim around the collar. He adds himself into the picture as her copilot, maybe the bombardier, the two of them huddled in a tiny cockpit, air masks loose on their chests, talking back and forth in low, assuring voices, consulting maps and waiting for the moment, the instant, when they come down low, snap open the bay doors on the bomber’s underside, dump their missiles, and then cruise upward, full throttle, away from the coming boom of heat and air.

He suddenly realizes Hazel has pivoted on her behind and is staring back at him. There’s no way to read the expression on her face, so he drops his head and begins to tend the campfire.

Someone on the end of the belt sparks a joint and begins to pass it down the line. Gabe doesn’t know how Hazel will react to this. Personally, he thinks the group should know the seriousness of this meeting and hold off partying till they adjourn. But, again, Hazel isn’t here to make rules. She’ll probably ignore the joint, impose seriousness with her voice and body movements.

She slides off the ticket counter now, a definition of ease and grace. She moves to the semicircle at a moderate pace, letting the heels of her secondhand ankle boots ignite an echoing click on the terminal’s mustard tile floor. The sound is like a gavel that brings the meeting to order. There are seven of them in all, including Gabe and Hazel. The oldest, the construction greaser called Eddie G, is probably closing in on thirty. Gabe is the youngest. No one’s really sure of Hazel’s age.

She steps up onto the baggage belt. She looks tremendous. She’s wearing stretch black pants with a huge maroon suede belt with big brass buckle, a zebra-striped tank top under an ancient, milky-blue jeans jacket with a barely visible zodiac wheel on the back. She pauses above them all and looks down at each face lit by the campfire, then steps down inside the semicircle and positions herself behind the fire. There’s a small but constant breeze making its way into the terminal and it fans the flames toward Hazel’s boots and makes a slight whispering sound.

“Okay,” Hazel says, “we’re here. I’m not going to stand here, like Browning or like Flynn, and say something asinine like ‘Thanks for coming.’ I don’t owe you any thanks. You’re all here ’cause you want to be. And every one of you knows that being here means something. Nobody here is stupid.”

She pauses and then, after looking at them again, she goes slowly down on her knees, her behind resting on her heels, her thighs parted and the fire angled between them. She passes her left hand through the flames slowly, like she was trying to clear them away to see something on the floor below. She looks up again and lowers her voice a little.

“We’re not at Wireless tonight, are we? We’re not at some futile negotiation upstairs in the Anarchy Museum. That’s because negotiations are over, kids. Done. Wireless has nothing to offer us anymore. It’s falling apart. From inside, the way these things always do. I don’t have time to go into the details, but trust Hazel, the break has already happened. There’s some very swinish behavior going on. Browning and all his old mothers have completely turned. There’s nothing more to discuss. It was bound to happen. I saw it coming. I told you all what I saw. Okay.”

She brings her hands together in a loud clap and stands back up.

“So, we are on our own and I don’t know about any of you, but it feels great to me. This means there’s nothing holding us back.”

She walks over next to Gabe, crouches, and puts a hand on his shoulder. “That makes me very excited,” she says. “Things get crazy from here on in. But we’ve got nothing against crazy, do we, Gabe?”

He looks into her firelit face, so thrilled to be singled out that he forgets to answer and one of the group laughs.

“No, we’ve got nothing against crazy, Hazel,” she answers for him.

She stands up again and moves back behind the fire. “We’ve been waiting for things to heat up forever”—another pause—“so let’s be clear about a few things. As good old Flynn used to say, let’s review the agenda. ’Cause there aren’t going to be a whole lot of these get-togethers from now on. This isn’t a joke anymore. There’s about to be some serious movement. Some serious relocation. As of tonight, this isn’t a social club. We’re not here for the secret handshakes and the passwords. What are we here for, Gabe?”

He’s ready this time, thankful for a second chance. As if reading from a book, he says, in a nervous, explicit voice, “We’re here to fuck up the normal modes of communication.”

The words slide out without a stutter or a stammer and he knows if he could just be next to Hazel twenty-four hours a day, he’d never have a problem with his tongue again.

“That’s right,” Hazel says, unable to stop a smile. “Very good, Gabe.”

She steps over to Eddie on the other side of the belt. He’s got the joint hanging from the corner of his lips. She puts a hand on Eddie’s shoulder and Gabe flinches.

“And with that in mind, Eddie, why don’t you tell everybody what we picked up tonight?”

He takes a hit off the joint and passes it to Diane, the redheaded cashier he lives with.

He stands up, though no one’s asked him to, puts his hands on his hips, and says, “Genuine, top-of-the-line plastique. Courtesy of our new friends the Hyenas.”

Hazel runs a hand through Eddie’s semipompadour, then wipes it across the back of his jacket.

“Oh, Eddie, you sweetheart,” she says, allowing herself just a little upbeat humor and enthusiasm.

She steps back to the center of the semicircle, squats down over her knees, and lets the fire illuminate her face.

“Flynn has asked for one more meeting, one more try at reconciliation, he says. I wasn’t even going to mention it to you. I thought I’d let them sit there in their little playroom and just wait all night. But I’ve changed my mind. We’ll go. We’ll make the break official. We’ll leave nothing to question.”

She stands up.

“I’m going to want to see every one of you back here afterward. Once we’ve established ourselves, security will become a big factor. After this first time, we’ll work in groups of two and three. But tonight I want everyone here.”

She indulges them with a last smile.

“Think of it as an Independence Day party. And Eddie, you’re in charge of the fireworks.”

31

Speer gives up trying to sleep after a half hour of tossing and turning. He pulls on a pair of pants, goes to the kitchen sink, and splashes several handfuls of cold water on his face. Then he moves to the refrigerator and takes out a half-empty can of Jolt soda. He takes a sip from the can, reaches into his pants pocket, and pulls out two white tablets. He blows a piece of lint off one of the pills, tosses them in his mouth, and washes them down with another hit of soda.

He moves to the metal stool at the kitchen table and takes a seat, flips on the plastic gooseneck lamp, and turns on the Kenwood. Static eases into the room. He opens his spiral notebook, glances at the wall clock, and starts to finger the tuning knob. Small, mostly unintelligible sounds make clipped entrances and exits as the indicator band slides down the range of frequencies. At 12,750 kHz, Speer stops and locks the tuner. He waits with his eyes closed and then a flute-like instrument sounds, something like a cheap penny whistle. It plays a simple, twenty-one-note melody, stops, then plays it again.

And then again. It’s a loop, a continuous pattern. The repetition soothes Speer. It’s like a forgotten childhood song that’s been given back to him. And now he can go on with the night.

He uncaps his Paper Mate and turns to a clean notebook page.

3 A.M.

Dear Margie,

Perhaps, finally, when all, as they say, is said and done, my dearest hope is that you come to own this notebook. I will admit that the likelihood of this happening is probably not very great. I could take precautions — place the book, at some point, in a safe-deposit box, list it in a will, contact an attorney, and legally establish you as my beneficiary. (In fact, your name is, of course, still on my standard Bureau-issue policy.)

But it seems to me that this could be thought of as tantamount to forcing my thoughts on you. And that is the last thing I want.

No, the best thing is to place this pulpy volume on the wings of chance. Perhaps it will be burned by Corny, the building super, just hours after the incineration of my own tired and all-too-mortal bones. Why the mention of death? you might ask. Simply because a large, essential part of me feels dead, has felt this way since your departure.

What does it feel like to be dead? It feels like the hiss of static, Margie. Does that make any sense to you? Do you find this inept hyperbole? I’m being very honest here. I’m attempting to explain the nature of my mind to you. Do you recall the sound? In the dark, in the middle of the night, often in the summer, when I was sweating and suffering insomnia, and I would go into the next room and turn on the receiver?

You despised the noise. Do you remember the incident, years ago, that Fourth of July? Our own fireworks. You said, “If you’d only tune something in. Anything but that static.” The next day I found the Koss headphones you’d left on my desk. But I have to admit, I still cannot wear them — that feeling of pressure over my ears.

Can you possibly see why I’m in such a void today, Margie? Why your leaving has shorted many of the deepest relays of my brain.

Again, part of me feels DEAD, Margie. And, I’m sorry, but you must accept responsibility for this status.

My current plan is to feed my (in your words: “legendary”) anger. I hope that this will resurrect me, lead me out of this cave of numbness. I feel that it’s working already. Certain organs are humming — that needles-and-pins feeling of returning life. My eyes and ears and, maybe most important, my intuition are all coming awake. Soon, I’ll be seeing things clearly again. Hearing all the sounds on all the bands.

THIS is why I used to listen to the static, Margie.

Recall, above, I referred to it as “seemingly” meaningless. All in the ear of the beholder, my once-loved. The truly angry man, the absolutely enraged man, can ferret out patterns and signs that all others will miss. His rage will bring him a hard-won purity with which to hear all the plans and plots and subversive information below the surface skin of this world. He will come to know his enemies. And he will triumph over them in his newfound wisdom.

To you, I’m sure, this doesn’t appear to have proved the case in my own personal history. But like most people, I’m sorry to say, you look at circumstantial evidence and accept it at face value, already having placed a particular meaning and value on it. You would say that my superiors dismissed me because my “legendary anger” resulted in the torture-death of a suspect. You would say, like those well-intentioned colleagues, that had I simply gunned down Mr. Ruggles — a genuine subversive as heinous as any I’ve tracked — we could have built a case of self-defense. But, instead, I cuffed the man around a telephone pole, took the emergency gas can from the trunk of the car, baptized his full skull with cleansing petrol, then slowly smoked a Tiparillo down to the glowing nub as I paced circles around this pleading conspirator.

But let me explain to you, Margie, what I could not tell my coworkers or the ranking agents of the review committee that dismissed me and then buried the facts of my actions anyway: When you are striving to save the soul of this world from absolute chaos, you must do more than fight the good fight. You must display a savagery that knows no conclusion. You must prove your willingness to always take the next step. To always exceed the limits of the will and the imagination. We will have order. And we will stop at nothing to achieve it.

Ruggles’s flaming head was a transmission to the agents of disorder.

But, I ramble.

I have much work to do now, sweet ex. I remain yours, with my ear to the ground.

32

“I finally get to see the den of iniquity,” Ronnie says as they climb up the stairs to Flynn’s apartment.

“More like the den of indemnification,” Flynn says.

Ronnie raises her eyebrows and Flynn shakes his head and says, “Insurance joke. Forget it.”

He unbolts both locks on the steel door, swings it open, and extends an arm for Ronnie to enter. Then he steps in behind her, resecures the door, opens the small foyer closet, and punches buttons on the box mounted to the rear wall to deactivate the alarm.

Ronnie smiles at him as he slides out of his jacket. “Expecting the S.S., maybe?”

“Can’t be too careful these days, right? I sleep easier knowing I’m wired.”

She moves in and puts her arms around his neck and says, “We’ll see about that.”

They stand clenched in the entryway for a while, just kissing, like high school steadies desperate for the date not to end. Finally, Ronnie brings her mouth away and says, “What have you got to drink?”

“How ’bout a couple brandies.”

“Sounds perfect.”

He steers her into the living room, takes her suede coat from her shoulders, and hangs it on the hook of an antique brass post. He slides out of his leather jacket, tosses it on a couch, and moves around the corner to the den, yelling back, “Get comfortable. I’ll just be a second.”

“My God,” Ronnie says, “you’ve got so much space.”

She hears Flynn laugh from the next room. “That’s the beauty of owning the building. This used to be three separate units. I knocked down some walls and spread out.”

He comes back into the room holding two snifters filled halfway with a smoky auburn liquid. He hands her one, raises his glass, and says, “To Marconi.”

“You romantic,” she says, then she raises her own glass and says, “And to the diode rectifier tube.”

“You tech-head,” Flynn says. “I’m impressed.”

They both take a small swallow. Flynn gestures to the couch and they sit. It’s a slightly odd moment for them both — two people who’ve spent a good chunk of the past twenty-four hours groping each other with no restraint, suddenly sitting back for some quiet conversation. It feels a little planned, a little formal.

Ronnie takes another sip and says, “This is a great building.”

Flynn tilts his head and smiles, pleased by the remark.

“Almost a hundred and twenty years old,” he says. “Designed by Tuckerman Potter. It’s on the historical register.”

Ronnie shakes her head. “You get off on that stuff, huh?”

“Stuff?”

“I don’t know, society stuff. You know what I mean.”

Flynn takes a drink and shrugs.

Ronnie sits up a little and says, “Or at least you seem to.”

“Meaning it’s not true?”

“Meaning I’m not sure. But why would a guy so concerned about the historical register knock down walls in the building and alter the original design?”

Flynn can’t help laughing. “You’re good at what you do,” he says, “figuring our motivations—”

“Any tenants upstairs?” Ronnie interrupts.

“Not anymore. I don’t need the rent and I like my privacy.”

He stands up and extends a hand toward her. “You want the tour?”

She gets up and says, “Absolutely.”

Flynn takes her hand and walks to the other side of the living room, fooling around, playing the professional guide. He lets his free hand sweep out into the air as if presenting some circus act. Then he points to the fireplace and begins.

“Carved wood panels imported from Ahmedabad, India. Vermont marble repainted to match its original shade of oxblood and fitted with pierced brass panels from England.”

He points to an ornamental clock on the mantel. “Picked it up in France. Dates to around 1900. Beaux Arts style.”

He gestures to the couch. “An Abbotsford pseudo-Gothic sofa. You know the word comes from the Arabic suffah, meaning bench. Mahogany frame, stuffed with horsehair.”

He nods to the odd chair next to the sofa. “Genuine George Jack easy chair covered in brocade.”

Ronnie moves over to the chair, puts a hand on it, but turns her attention to a framed print on the wall. It’s a matted piece of calligraphy, a poem inked in ornate lettering:

You little box, held to me when escaping

So that your valves should not break,

Carried from house to ship from ship to train,

So that my enemies might go on talking to me

Near my bed, to my pain

The last thing at night, the first thing in the morning,

Of their victories and of my cares,

Promise me not to go silent all of a sudden.

— Bertolt Brecht

Flynn calls her attention from the wall and begins to point to cabinets and end tables. “A Vile-Cobb George III mahogany bombe commode. A James Lamb veneered mahogany sideboard out of Manchester, probably around 1875. And that there, that’s a satinwood cabinet with ivory handles designed by E. W. Goodwin.”

“E. W. himself?” Ronnie says, lifting up her eyebrows, playing a parody of some impressed tourist. But she loves the show. It’s so unexpected, a real curveball. She would’ve expected Flynn to be all yuppie contemporary or franchise Scandinavian.

And he likes the fact she’s kidding him. He finishes up by swirling some brandy around in his snifter and says, “The floors are pure maple, walls are covered in canvas with basrelief borders, ceiling’s Adams plaster.”

Ronnie is shaking her head slowly and smiling. “And you know what all that crap means?” she says.

“More or less. Had to find out just enough to know when I was getting taken by the dealers.”

“G.T. Flynn getting suckered,” Ronnie says. “Tough to picture.”

“You should see what they gouged me for a carved oak four-poster bed.”

Ronnie steps up to him and runs a hand up into the hair over his ear. “Yeah, but I’m about to increase its value tremendously.”

From a back room deep in the apartment a phone rings once and stops. Flynn leans in, kisses her forehead, and says, “Hold that thought. That’s the business line in the study.”

Ronnie squints at him. “You get business calls at three in the morning?”

He starts to move out of the room, saying, “That’s part of the deal when you handle people’s money for them.”

He walks through the den and then through a small ante-room and stands before a pair of varnished-wood doors on tracks that slide into the wall. He unlocks the sliding doors, steps inside the study, rolls the doors closed again, and relocks them. He turns around a little hesitantly. The contrast between the Victorian decor of the rest of the apartment and the cool minimalism of the study always makes him a little queasy, like he’s stepped off a carnival ride before it’s completely stopped.

The study is so absolutely different from the rest of the building that it might as well exist in another space and time. This is the way Flynn wants it. The study has a specific and definite purpose. It houses a distinct, unique vein of his life. He wanted the room to be a small world unto itself. He wanted it to feel like every time he rolled open the sliding doors and stepped inside, he was crossing an enormous threshold, darting through some cultural membrane and into a vault of secret, hidden yearnings.

He crosses over the soundproof carpeting to the end section of black metal shelving and grabs the cordless phone and says, “Hello.”

“Flynn,” a woman’s voice says, “it’s Hannah Shaw.”

He’d expected Wallace or maybe Hazel. “Detective Shaw,” he says, “it’s a little late—”

She cuts him off, clearly annoyed. “Yeah, I’m not doing so good with time these days. And I figured you’d just be getting in from Wireless.”

“I didn’t make it to the bar tonight,” he says. “I’m entertaining some guests here at home. What can I do for you, Ms. Shaw?”

There’s a pause, then a sound that’s part breath and part laugh. “Do for me? Look, Flynn, you’re the one who asked for a favor. If I got you at a bad time—”

His sales instincts kick and he changes his voice and says, “No, no, I’m sorry. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. Sometimes the phone can just jangle you, you know? Especially at this time of night. You expect to hear there’s been some sort of accident or—”

“Yeah, fine,” Hannah says. “Look, I checked up on your little friend and it looks like she’s trying to make a move.”

“My little friend,” Flynn repeats.

“The woman is not what she seems, Flynn. And her allegiances are definitely not to you. You’re being set up. I’d have thought you were a better judge of character.”

“Listen, Hannah—”

She makes it clear she doesn’t like the familiarity. “In the future I’d be more careful who I associated with, Mr. Flynn. Man in your position should really take precautions. My advice at this stage of the game would be to get some distance from the woman. She’s a disaster. She can’t be trusted.”

“Detective,” Flynn says, “I wonder if we could get together tomorrow for—”

“It’s late, Flynn, like you said. I did you a favor. Mainly because you were a friend of Lenore’s. Now, I’m extremely busy right now. You can either take my advice or forget it. Really doesn’t matter to me.”

Before Flynn can speak he hears the click of her hang-up.

He stands still in the. darkness for a minute, then brings the phone up to his mouth, taps it against his lips.

Okay, he thinks, we’ve lost Hazel.

He moves to put the phone back on the shelf and flinches. She was talking about Hazel, right? Why didn’t she mention the name? Why didn’t she say “Hazel”?

He tries to replay Shaw’s words, wishes he’d taped the call, wishes he could just hit the toggle on his reel-to-reel and rehear everything that was said. But it’s like the conversation mutated into a vague dream as soon as Shaw disconnected. And now all he can bring up, the only words that he feels sure he heard are the woman is not what she seems.

And then, from the living room, comes Ronnie’s slightly muffled voice calling, “Hey, Flynnster, I’m getting lonely out here.”

33

The Tribal Drum Noodle House sits down on Watson Street, at the very border of Little Asia, one of the last outposts before the ways of the Orient dissolve into the glossy and sulky exhibitionism of the Canal Zone. As a matter of fact, the restaurant shares a common wall with a slick new hip-hop joint called Propa Gramma, run by a mulatto Casanova named Jerome LaCroix.

The Tribal Drum’s proximity to the Zone has altered it a bit, set it far apart from the dozens of other Asian eateries in Bangkok. More often than not, the majority of the clientele come from over the line, semihungry artistes and poseurs drifting from the red brick galleries and smoke-clogged cafes, slim books clutched in hands, looking for some decent wonton and maybe a communal plate of moo shu vegetables.

Because of this fact, the Drum’s owners, a holding company called Sozhou Limited Trust, tried a faddish motif that clicked and held. Some regulars believe the invisible company stumbled on an unknown designer crazed enough to bring back seventies kitsch. An opposing faction maintains that the joint’s owners are brand-new to the shore and their sense of American style, and maybe even language, was born while religiously studying seventies TV sitcoms day and night. A third, slightly cocky group holds that the decor has more to do with the fact that the holding company botched a warehouse job and somehow got saddled with a gross of pastel-colored Princess rotary telephones.

Whatever the case, having some Beijing ravioli at the Tribal Drum is like dining in a museum of the tacky and synthetic. There are Lava lamps on the tables and beanbag chairs in the lounge. The floors are covered with lime-colored, heavy shag carpeting. The bartenders dress in mint leisure suits and qiana shirts opened to the navel and equipped with long dagger collars. The waiters and waitresses wear zip-up velour jerseys and bell-bottom pants made from a shiny material that no one can put a name to. Lately, the manager has been pushing Thursdays as Polyester Night.

But it’s the Princess telephones that have evolved into the real draw. Each booth is wired with one, but they’re only workable inside the Drum. You can’t dial out, but you can call any other table in the place. The Canal Zone crowd went crazy for this gimmick and the restaurant suddenly became a retro singles club. In one of the Zone’s underground weeklies, an article came out detailing the benefits of this newfound playland: In this age of detachment, disease, and serial killers, mingling with horny strangers was a risk too great to take. We’ve entered a new epoch that demands what the author termed “The Death of the Date.” The article eschewed physical contact “up to and including the actual witnessing of the romantic-other’s face.” But this doesn’t have to mean the end of dating. Using the Tribal Drum’s new methodology, we can continue to link up safely and secretly and solely electronically.

And now the Noodle House is a nest of chronic bell-ringing and choruses of mumbled, fabricated names whispered into powder-blue receivers by boothfuls of depressed, skinny, pale-faced sculptors and playwrights and lonely method actors.

Hannah can’t believe this is where she’s eating dinner. But this is where Dr. Cheng told her to be and she didn’t push the issue. The doctor’s voice seems more withdrawn and haunted each time they speak and Hannah senses that giving him an argument could sever their ties for good, explode a unique relationship that’s taken a year to mold.

She’s sitting in a rear booth, working on her fourth cup of tea, trying not to listen to the dodges and equivocations that issue from the hip young mouths surrounding her. All these odd words and vague phrases seem to rise and mix in the air with a heavy cover of smoke from a wide selection of European cigarettes. When she feels her annoyance increasing to a danger point, she reminds herself that all this phone babble has got to be better than the idea of these people mating and procreating.

Hannah personally detests the telephone. She acknowledges the machine as an instrument of progress, a time-saver — in some instances, a lifesaver. But her own experience has been that the phone has brought more bad news than good by an enormous margin. And though she’s never told anyone this, on at least one occasion she’s held the barrel of her Magnum up to her ringing bedroom touch-tone.

She glances to her watch. Dr. Cheng is only ten minutes late, but that’s enough to signal a problem. The doctor is a fanatically punctual being. It’s a concept tied into his notions of respect and order and efficiency. She understands that he doesn’t want her coming to the Herbarium anymore, but if he was sick or another meeting ran late, he should have sent a messenger.

She swallows the last of her tea and slides from the booth as the phone rings. And she hesitates, knowing that right now, hearing a stupid word about love or sex could result in some quick and futile violence — some anonymous crotch scalded with boiling ginseng.

But she picks up the phone anyway and says a flat “Yeah?”

There’s the sound of someone trying to breathe through a semiclogged throat, then a distant, weak cough, and then the soft voice. Dr. Cheng says, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, Hannah.”

She slides back into the booth, switches the phone to her opposite ear. “Is there a problem, Doc? Everything all right?”

Another attempt at a cough, then, “I apologize for my delay. I’m afraid I won’t be able to see you tonight.”

“Should I come by, Doc—”

“No, no,” he says, adamant, the voice suddenly stronger. “This won’t be necessary. I have some information for you. Something you might find useful.”

As he speaks, it again occurs to Hannah that, supposedly, these phones are all internally wired. You can’t dial out. They’re not hooked to the street poles. They’re not part of the normal city system.

“Doc, where are you?” Hannah blurts.

She hears a faint sigh that holds more resignation than annoyance and Hannah bucks, not exactly at being stood up, but more at the feeling that the doctor intends to make this a brief and one-sided conversation. Hannah is used to getting her questions answered.

Dr. Cheng says, “I had some of my people make some inquiries.”

“Inquiries,” Hannah repeats, in a voice that gives just a hint of impatience.

“We spoke with management at a selection of the major chemical distributors in the region.”

This time Hannah stays quiet and the doctor knows he’s got her full attention and cooperation.

“I felt that I might have certain avenues of persuasion not available to your people, Hannah.”

He says “your people” like the department was her goddamn family. Like Zarelli and Richmond were her crude brothers, Miskewitz some bored and tired stepfather.

“We uncovered some information,” the doctor continues, drawing out the last word, “that I felt I should share with you.”

Hannah tries to keep her voice bland and says, “I’d appreciate anything you’ve got,”

“A company called Hofmann Chemtech. Out Route 77 in Whitney. Second-generation business. A midsized firm that picked up far too much debt during the boom. They swallowed some smaller competitors. Modernized the plant. Again, we see a lack of vision. The loans are tottering. The shylocks at the door.”

She wants to say, Can the analysis and give me the goddamn name, Doc, but instead gives a mild, semi-interested, “It’s a brutal market these days.”

“I had once reviewed this particular firm for investment. Years ago. But even then, I didn’t like the numbers.”

Hannah simply says, “Ironic.”

“Yes,” the doctor says, and then there’s a long moment when neither speaks.

Finally, Hannah breaks and says, “You spoke to some people?”

“As I said, a few of my aides have been making inquiries. Visiting plants in the region that supply benzine or benzine-based products.”

A picture comes into Hannah’s head that she can’t immediately dismiss: a scene of Cheng’s meat-boys beating a name from the lips of a broken, cash-strapped man who can’t conceive of why his life continues to unravel. She would like to hope they didn’t have to go too gangland, permanently harm the tongue or eyes or kneecaps. But she knows Cheng’s “aides” walked away from Whitney with something. Or Cheng wouldn’t have made this phone call.

She grabs tight on the phone, switches it back to her original ear, and says, “You’ve got something to tell me?”

Another pause, then the doctor says, “We assured the individual there would be no official consequences. There were violations of certain licensing and—”

She can’t stand it anymore. She yells, “Just say it, for Christ sake,” and then she immediately regrets her action.

In a dispassionate voice, Cheng says, “They sold a small amount of benzine to an unaffiliated Caucasian male six weeks ago. Cash transaction. Two meetings. All business conducted in the woods behind that Catholic orphanage in Whitney.”

“A name?”

“No.” He takes a shallow breath, then adds, “But at the initial meeting, the buyer produced a badge of some sort.”

“A badge? You mean, like a police badge?”

There’s no answer and for a second Hannah thinks Cheng has hung up, then, as if he’s just recalled a punch line, the old man says, “A Federal badge.”

Now it’s Hannah that goes quiet for a second, then asks, “No name or number?”

“The seller says it happened very quickly. That it was likely intended as some kind of threat or motivation. Believe me, Detective, had there been more information, my people would have returned with it.”

Hannah knows this is the truth.

From behind the facing wall of her booth, without any warning, horribly loud percussion suddenly revs up from Propa Gramma, the club next door. It’s followed by the syncopated call of a mostly unintelligible rap sermon from what sounds like a female duo. The words bastard, sisters, and payback seem to be repeated like a funk-mantra backed by a strong bass line. Hannah covers her free ear with her palm and presses the receiver tighter against her head.

“I hope you’ll find this story helpful,” the doctor says.

Acting contrite isn’t Hannah’s strong suit, but she tries to put some humility behind her words and says, “I’m sure I will. Thanks for filling me in, Doc.”

“You’re welcome,” Cheng says. “And I hope, should you learn anything more, you’ll not hesitate in relaying your findings to Little Asia.”

Hannah takes her palm from her ear, makes a fist, and futilely pummels the shared wall, as if this will lower the volume of the music.

“Since when is it necessary to say that, Doctor?”

There’s no response.

“I’ve always worked the split with you,” Hannah says, turning sideways away from the wall, her voice rising. “We’ve had an unspoken agreement. When have I not honored the deal?”

Finally Cheng says, “Our understanding has served us both.”

“I’ll bring you what I find,” Hannah says, suddenly wanting to hang up.

“I’m sure you will,” Cheng says. “But it would be better if I came to you—”

“Yeah, I understand. You don’t want me down Verlin Ave anymore—”

“You don’t understand, Hannah—”

She cuts him off and says, “Tell me something. You own part of this place, right? You own a piece of the Tribal Drum?”

He gives a wheezy laugh and says, “I’m simply a neighborhood doctor, Hannah—”

She interrupts again, “And I’m the Virgin Mary. Do yourself a favor and soundproof this dump.”

“I’ll check on you soon,” Cheng says, and then, after a beat of silence, he hangs up.

Hannah sits for a second with the phone still pressed against her head. A waiter approaches carrying a fresh pot of steaming tea atop a red plastic tray. His neck is weighed down with a dozen ropes of gold chain. His hair blown dry into a perfectly curved helmet that covers any sign of his ears.

“Can I get you something?” he yells over the music.

Hannah can actually feel the pulse of it through the wall. She slides out of the booth and faces him and without thinking, she says, “I’ve been stood up.”

He puts on an exaggerated frown as if he finds this impossible to believe. He gestures down to the phone and says, “Why don’t you sit back down? I’ll bring you a Mai Tai and you can see who calls.”

Hannah stares at him, shakes her head, then moves for the exit, throwing her shoulder into the waiter’s arm as she passes, sending the boiled tea into the air, splashing a shower over the next booth of jabbering regulars.