Wireless

34

Flynn has no idea how to lose this edgy feeling that’s lodged in his stomach since he took the call from Shaw. But he’s convinced that attending the Todorov Memorial Parade down here in the Zone sure as hell won’t help. Unfortunately, Ronnie insisted, so now they’re shoulder-to-shoulder with the elite hip, trapped in a chic swarm roaming from display to event to performance down the length of Rimbaud Way.

It’s not that Fr. Todorov had any solid connection with the Canal Zone clique. Mainly, he liked to be seen eating in the restaurant of the month with the poet of the week. But the Canalites have this weird passion for parades, and any occasion is usually suitable for a petition to block off the main drag and form a swaying convoy of disparate and stylish contingents, each equipped with makeshift costumes and floats and their own P.A. system for spreading one more unique manifesto.

The bulk of the Canal Zone is made up of mammoth brick mills and factories, the earliest of which ran off the current of the Benchley River. A few of the small factories still operate, but for the most part, the backbone of Quinsigamond industry has fled heating costs and union wages and vanished to places like Arizona and Malaysia.

Fanned out beyond the old sweatshops are the tenements that housed the immigrant labor. Flynn thinks that maybe the most interesting piece of Quinsigamond history is the half-forgotten fact that the Yankee bosses were adamant about housing each ethnic group separately. So there was an Irish block and an Italian block, a French block and Polish block. The unspoken idea was that if these dissimilar workers didn’t learn each other’s language, they’d never be able to organize and turn their collective power against the owners. Though the plan failed, Flynn can see there was this awful brilliance to it, this mad social-scientist flair. Keep the peasants suspicious of each other and they’ll never notice their real enemy.

Generations later, those original mill-working families have battled their way up to middle class and beyond. The Yankee barons are long since dead. And the factories are the decayed remnants of an invisible war, settled by neither victory nor negotiation, but rather, simple and vicious obsolescence. The buildings are used as everything from theaters and warehouses and biker clubs to subdivided office spaces, a roller-skating rink, a bowling alley.

And the tenements for the workers are now tenements for the art crowd. The cheap rent and gritty ambience have pulled in bohemians from all over New England and they slouch up and down McJacob and Dupin and, especially, Rimbaud Way — the Zone within the Zone — day and night, looking for imagery, free coffee, semi-soft drugs, pseudo-safe sex, and bitingly hip conversation. There appear to be laws about dressing in black, avoiding the sunlight, suppressing visible emotion, and the proper use of hair products.

During an average day, the Canal Zone streets are crowded and busy. Today the place is a bobbing sea of skinny bodies. There are people everywhere and they’re all feeding off each other, communally crazed on this buzz running through the air, this shared conception that some major incident is about to take place. Flynn has never been to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, but he’d bet this might be a close approximation. It’s like a spontaneous unorganized circus has gotten lost on the road and come to an unexpected stop in some outdoor museum of the middle industrial age. It’s like a ragtag carnival has mutated and grown to an unreasonable proportion.

This is their idea, Flynn thinks, of a memorial for a murder victim?

The idea down in the Zone seems to be to invert everything, toward the end of finding some other, hidden level of meaning. It’s as if all the residents have agreed that, no matter what else they might do to turn a coin or relieve the pressure, this is the real job, this hunt for codes and messages is the only genuine occupation. Their environment practically demands it. There’s so much input. There’s no way to avoid all the signals and symbols and markings that scream from every direction. They move through a constant sea of obscure bulletins, an ongoing blitz of never-quite-clear communiques. The graffiti alone is blinding. Every individual red brick in the Zone seems to be partially splashed with paint. The residents will tell you that no one ever sees the artist in the act. You simply walk down the street one day and notice a picture or a word or a series of words that wasn’t there before. Supposedly, there’s an acquired thrill in trying to discern different styles, in attempting to guess who created what.

Flynn looks down at the long side of the old Seward typewriter factory. The wall is covered, right up to the roof, thirty feet off the ground. He wonders if you flew over the Zone in a plane, would you find signs on the roof itself? The artwork is striking. There’s real talent down here, people with actual ability. Do they really prefer mill walls as their canvases? Is this the medium they most want to work in? He stares at the Seward and tries to take everything in: pictures of fire rings, photo-real crucifixes, naked bodies copulating, silver B-movie flying saucers, still lifes of orchids and small dead birds, a ram’s head, a pentagram. And then there are the words, sentence fragments mostly—

O’ZBON RULES

the boys are back in town

Jammers do it on the run

“… night is the cathedral where we recognize

the sign …”—Vega

A sheet of white paper catches a breeze and blows against his legs. Flynn picks it up and reads. It’s a flier, an ad for a free concert following the parade:

Today Only

From the roof of “St Anthony’s Temptation”

Q-town’s own

SEVERED ARTERY

plays a free “Open Channel Jam” Jam

from their soon to be released album

Chug the Hemlock on Visigoth Temple Records

Flynn lets the flier fall to the street and he and Ronnie continue to move slowly down Rimbaud. They start to spot dozens of pockets of sideshows, little circles of performance artists, huckster games, Grand Guignol puppet shows, and, surprisingly, corny little novelty schticks. But this being the Canal Zone, even the standard carny bit has an edge and a weirdness to it.

On the corner of Goulden Ave there’s this bearded transvestite shill running a Guess Your Neurosis booth. Out in front of Bella C’s Tavern there’s a trio of sad-faced doowop singers trying to croon harmony out of these old Workers’ Party folk tunes. Next to them, a teenage girl is working a cardboard monte table using a Tarot pack. But the hottest attraction of all seems to be a Dunk the Mime tank in front of Orsi’s Rib Room. People are lined up before the diner, waiting to toss baseballs at a round target. The current patron is hurling speed balls like he’s furious and on his second pitch he nails a bull’s-eye and the white-faced, black leotard-clad Marcel Marceau wannabe plummets from his perch into a tub of water.

Halfway down Rimbaud, a carousel has been planted in the center of the street, but instead of horses the wooden animals are all myth creatures — griffin, hydra, basilisk, sphinx, bunyip, harpies, various dragons, all with open, fanged, predatory mouths. Next to the carousel is a revival exhibition of classic late-seventies slam dancing. Skinheads lined up in rows at opposite gutters seem to wait for some obscure signal, maybe some crude octave buried in the Husker-Du bootleg that’s blasting from Marshall lamps mounted on the closest tenement rooftop. At the right moment they charge at full run to midstreet where they collide with an opposing punk, smash knees, chests, skulls, ricochet off each other and enjoy lesser, secondary collisions with other flying bodies.

Flynn and Ronnie pass through a charge, somehow untouched, and move along past a row of slick trench-coated hipsters, eyes hidden behind black lenses in 1950s Steve Allen frames. Each ranter is up on his own fruit crate and that small elevation gives them some credibility, Flynn thinks. They gesticulate as they ramble, all throaty, scatological babble, a dozen different bent ideologies to sample and take or leave.

None of this craziness is amusing Flynn and he fears that the levels of both his anxiety and the street weirdness are increasing as they walk. Ronnie senses the tension. She pulls him up onto the sidewalk and yells near his ear, “You want to head back to the Rib Room and get a coffee? It’s still a while before the parade comes by.”

Flynn can’t help himself. He says, “The Memorial, you mean.”

Ronnie takes his arm and pulls him down another block where the music is slightly muted. She shrugs and says, “What?”

He shrugs back at her. “Don’t you think this is a little, I don’t know … disrespectful?”

“Disrespectful?” Ronnie says. “That word doesn’t get used very often down here. God, Flynn, you sure know how to surprise me. It’s a celebration. Jeez, Mr. Catholic here. You never heard of celebrating the sacrifice?”

“You mean the Mass?” Flynn says. “You never heard of ‘for the greater good’? What good comes out of Todorov being fried? Where’s the redemption?”

“Maybe that remains to be seen.”

“Yeah,” Flynn says. “Maybe.”

She looks at him a second, as if debating whether or not to keep talking, then she makes a decision and starts to move again. He goes after her, takes her arm, and pulls her next to him. He wishes he could find a way to tell her what’s going on, but he’s not sure himself. He wants to shake this feeling. He wants to find a way back to that first night at the old airport, that feeling of ignition, of being conscious of the excitement and the possibility, the chance at a long-shot renewal. But the harder he works at shrugging off this virus of paranoia and suspicion and general unease, the more it seems to integrate itself within his system, honestly like a cancer, these haunting cells of distrust multiplying, jumping from organ to organ, forming pathways to further infection, toward a near future of … what? Where does this kind of virus leave you? In the shadow of a degrading psychosis? With a spleen full of perfect intolerance, aged beyond recognition, but still alive enough to feel the waves of panic and impotence and persecution?

It’s that goddamn call from Lenore’s little clone. You’re being set up. By who, for Christ sake? If it’s Ronnie, then where’s her margin? The jammers don’t touch her. She’s the goddess of the radio freaks. Why come after them? Unless her allegiance is to the station in general. Unless she simply believes in this system, this program of licensing and control and commerce. Unless she’s a believer, a zealot, a reverse picture, a mirror image of Hazel who can’t accept the disorder the jammers create, can’t allow for a world where anarchy is the goal, rather than harmony. Where chaos is honored and yearned for over discipline and regularity.

Flynn needs to put some food in his stomach. He grabs Ronnie’s hand and starts to maneuver the two of them faster through the throng of revelers. But before he can spot an open cafe, Ronnie squeezes his hand, gives a quick squeal, and points across the street. Between two identical red brick tenements, someone’s erected an ancient wooden Ferris wheel. It just barely fits into the alley between the buildings and it rises just as high as the seven-storied apartment houses. Each carriage is painted a different color and the spokes of the wheel are trimmed with ropes of multicolored lights. Tenants sit in the open windows of the top-floor apartments on either side of the alley and when the wheel halts to let the occupants of the bottom carriage exit, the tenants lean out and touch fingertips with the riders stranded up top.

As Flynn stops to watch this display, Ronnie grabs his arm and starts to run for the wheel, yelling like a kid, “We’ve got to go up.”

She buys two tickets from a large black woman wearing an old cotton housedress covered by an ankle-length leather coat with huge flaplike lapels and metal-studded epaulets. Ronnie’s excitement is genuine and Flynn thinks that if he can just catch a bit of it, he can turn the day around. He can kill the haunting in his stomach and end the night slow-dancing in front of an abandoned runway.

They climb into a sky-blue carriage with the name Ghost Rider stenciled in glitter paint on the front, buckle the heavy safety straps across their laps, and the carny woman latches the metal crossbar, then yanks down a lever behind her and they start to rise. It’s a slow climb — they stop briefly every few minutes as someone below exits a carriage and new riders get on. But then it’s a full ride and the continuous loops begin. For some reason the wheel is running backward and though Flynn has never been afraid of heights, he hopes Ronnie won’t get funny and start rocking their rig.

She huddles into him like some midwestern teen surprised by love at a church fair. She lowers her head onto his shoulder. She’s trying, he knows. She wants some fun, a little romance. She wants some possibilities. Why can’t he give her that? It should be simple, as natural as the movement of his feet on the cracked tarmac the first night, or the progressions of the saxophone that guided their hips and arms.

Something’s lacking now. Something’s fallen away. He simply doesn’t know how to restore trust. And though Ronnie can’t know the cause of his discomfort, she knows something’s wrong.

They come to the crest of the wheel’s arc, maybe sixty feet up, and the tenement witnesses smile out on them. Flynn thinks he and Ronnie must look like some kind of icon for love or courtship, some sort of current definition of the first stages of mating. Something in him wants to yell to the people in the windows — two paint-spattered young men on his side, a trio of college-age women, all dressed in green camouflage garb, on Ronnie’s side—Don’t believe it yet, the facts aren’t all in.

As they linger at the top of the arc, the lights that line the spokes start to flicker and then die out all at once. The sputter noises of the wheel’s generator cease and a gust of greasy-smelling smoke blows up past them. From the ground, the French-Haitian accent of the woman in the leather storm coat starts to bellow a string of bilingual curses. Flynn looks at Ronnie, then peers out over the side of the carriage to see the attendant pounding on the generator.

Flynn shakes his head and Ronnie says, “What?”

“I think we’re stuck up here.”

Ronnie seems more excited than anxious and says, “Tremendous.”

“You’re kidding,” Flynn says, again annoyed.

“This is fantastic,” Ronnie says, leaning forward and tilting the carriage a bit. “Look at the view.”

“This isn’t funny, Ronnie,” Flynn says. He looks down again and yells, “Hey, move this thing.”

Now Ronnie pulls away from him and in an equally annoyed voice says, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Like hell.”

Flynn runs a hand over his face, exasperated, and says, “You know, I tried to tell you I didn’t want to come to this thing.”

Ronnie sighs. “Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t think it was that big a deal.”

Flynn looks to the window and the painters give him a smug pair of smiles.

He looks away and says, “It’s not a big deal. I’m just … Just a bad day.”

Ronnie lets her feet stretch out into the air, stares at them, and says, “Am I keeping you from Wireless?”

“For Christ sake—”

“I just don’t get it. You’re like night and day. What, do your radio friends disapprove—”

“Don’t be sarcastic,” Flynn says.

“Have you broken some club rule?” she asks. “Is your heart reserved for the jammers?”

He lowers his voice and says, “I wish you wouldn’t use that word.”

She can’t let it go. “Does it have some connotation I’m not aware of?”

“For one thing, it’s illegal. And for another, like I’ve already told you, it’s got nothing to do with me.”

There are a few beats of silence as they both pretend to study the street below. Then Ronnie ignores her instincts and says, “Sounds like I’m pushing a button here, G.T.”

Flynn turns sideways to face her and says, “And it sounds to me like maybe your interest in this thing is greater than I thought.”

She tries to keep a smile on her face and says, “Which means?”

“I’m not sure what it means. That’s what worries me.”

“You’re questioning my motives, G.T.”

“You’re giving me reason to.”

“You think I want you to lead me to the people who are knocking QSG off the air? You think that’s why we’re together?”

He stares at her a long time before saying, “Hey, Ronnie. We’ve known each other about forty-eight hours. Okay?”

She cocks her head in a way that makes him think she’s about to start rocking the carriage. Instead she says, “So how much time has to go by before I can ask you questions?”

“I’ll let you know,” he says, trying to sound like he’s joking.

“My curiosity is piqued. I want to hear the life story. Birth to our meeting at Wireless.”

“Never invite that kind of boredom on yourself.”

“What’s the matter, Flyrin? Am I suspect for wanting to know about you?”

“You’ll notice I haven’t asked any questions.”

“Yeah. And I’m starting to take it as a sign of disinterest.”

“Wrong. Incorrect. Couldn’t be more wrong.”

“Isn’t there anything you want to know about me?”

Flynn shrugs. “I just figure we’ll come to it as we go, you know. I figure we’ll just naturally run into things. We take a walk, we see a dog, you say, ‘I had a dog like that when I was little.’ Okay, now I know you owned a retriever.”

“I never had a dog,” Ronnie says.

“Okay. There you go. Now I know that.”

“What? Is every discussion an interrogation to you? I mean, you sell life insurance for a living, for God’s sake. You’ve got to be good at small talk.”

“Now, that’s different,” Flynn says. “That’s a device. Tool of the trade.”

“Funny, we both talk for a living.”

“Well, we both get paid for talking. Big difference.”

“You’re disagreeable today, Flynn.”

“You wanted to know something about me. There you go — I’m pretty discerning about the choice of words.”

“A word fetish, huh?” Ronnie says. “A little anal retentive in that department—”

“I didn’t say that, did I?”

“Did I do something to put you in a bad mood?”

He looks at her, gives her his best Whole-Life-with-Decreasing-Premium smile. Then he catches himself, kills the smile, shakes his head in frustration, and says, “No. You haven’t done anything. There’s just a hell of a lot on my mind. I should have left work problems behind.”

She looks down to his Ballys and slowly back up till she’s focused on his face. Then she brings out her best heckler-squelching voice and says, “I’m not buying.”

“Pardon?”

She takes her hands from the pockets of her jacket and folds her arms across her chest. “I’m not buying it,” she says. “I’ve got a different theory on what’s happening here.”

He doesn’t like the tone or the direction she’s heading. “Want to fill me in?” he says, though he’s not sure he wants to hear the rest.

“I think we’re intrigued by each other. I think there’s some real infatuation between us. I think we want to follow it, give in and see where we end up. I think we know the sexual possibilities look very good. Neither one of us can stop thinking about the studio the other night—”

“So, where’s the problem?” he asks, getting nervous with the buildup.

“The problem is we’re not sure of each other’s motives or intentions.”

“Who is,” Flynn says, “when you first meet some—”

“No, no. This is a little different from your standard new romance. Okay? This is something else, beyond the normal doubts like has this person got some dark side I won’t see for six months? This has to do with different kinds of questions.”

He thinks she wants him to say such as, but he stays silent.

Ronnie goes on. “Questions like — is this person, maybe, setting me up? Using me to get information? I mean, I’ll admit you’ve got some reason to be suspicious. I came to the bar to find you. Specifically, to see what you knew about who was jamming the station.”

He stays quiet for another minute, then says, “Okay, you’re sure you want to get into this?”

She nods. “Got to happen sooner or later and now’s as good a time as any.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” he mutters, glancing down to the ground.

“It’s not that far a fall,” she says. “Odds are one of us would survive.”

He doesn’t like the comment, but he lets it go.

“Okay,” he says, “first of all, it’s a fact that I have other things on my mind lately. There’s a lot of pressure at work. Sales are down. The competition is brutal.”

“You just didn’t strike me as a guy who worried a lot about competition.”

“Everyone worries about competition, Ronnie.”

“Especially radio stations.”

“I know that you think that, at very least, I know something about the jamming. You think I know who’s knocking Ray down. You tapped into some fringe adolescent somewhere who heard of my name and passed it on. Okay, the fact is I do hang out at Wireless quite a bit. I know the owners. I handle some money for them. I spend quite a few nights there. So you’ve got guilt by association. You sure you’re comfortable with that?”

She lowers her voice. “Look, Flynn, what we’ve done in the past two days should tip you off to the fact that I’m, you know, a little quirky. Unconventional. Let’s say unconventional. I’m kind of intrigued by anything that’s a little different, a little off balance, okay? So the jamming interested me. I wanted to know more. So I called some horny fans, some kids who listen to the show and try to picture what I look like. And, yes, they gave me Wireless and they gave me your name. And a bunch of other names—”

“What names?”

“What does it matter? Let me finish here. So I went the other night. And I asked some people, some women, who you were—”

“Which women?”

“And they pointed you out. And I liked what I saw. Where’s the crime? My point is I don’t know exactly why I went to Wireless the other night. I just wanted to take a look. I wanted to start something new. I didn’t have a specific motive—”

“Like hell. You started asking questions as soon as we met—”

“And it worked,” she says, her voice rising enough for the people in the tenement windows to stare. “It got you interested. It started things rolling. That’s what I do, for Christ sake. That’s why I’m so good on the air. It’s instinct. I just feel where someone’s buttons are. And then I push. I like to dive into new water all the time, G.T. What’s the problem? It keeps life interesting. Jamming is something I know next to nothing about. And the jammers seem interested in me, remember? I’m the one they leave alone. I’d like to know why.”

“I’ll bet the people you work for would like to know why.”

“You’re really starting to annoy me,” Ronnie says. “You know that?”

“Just reassure me. Just say to my face that no one asked you to check things out.”

“The other night in the studio. You think I did that at someone’s request?”

“I’m just saying—” Flynn begins, but she cuts him off and he can see the anger flooding her face.

“You’ve got two choices, Flynn. You can think we stumbled into each other and something interesting is about to happen. Or you can think I’m using you to get the jammers.”

“Now, wait—”

But she cuts him off again and he knows he went with the wrong response. His instincts are failing him.

“Well, screw you. You bastard. You think I rent my body out so the management can cut losses?”

“No, Ronnie, look—”

“You look. You little scumbag—”

“Please. I didn’t mean—”

“What? Tell me.” She’s yelling now.

“I loved last night. I didn’t mean to say—”

“I don’t know what you mean, Flynn. I don’t know anything about you.”

“Just let me explain, give me a second here.”

She lowers her voice again, but brings her face up close to his. “You blew it. You’re a schmuck.”

There’s a burst of applause from the women in the window. One of them yells, “Give him hell, sister,” and balls her hand into a radical fist.

Ronnie turns and starts to unbuckle her safety belt. She turns and gestures to her newfound comrades. “Move over, I’m coming in.”

Flynn reaches over and takes hold of her arm. She bucks, flails her arm out of his grip, enraged.

She says, “Let go of me,” loud enough for the whole street to hear.

“Hey, people,” one of the painters yells from his window, “you’re going to get hurt.”

“Jesus, c’mon, Ronnie,” Flynn rasps with his molars clenched together.

She glares at him and starts to climb up onto the seat. The carriage rocks forward and Flynn screams, “Jesus Christ, sit down.”

Ronnie braces herself with a hand on a strut and starts to raise her leg. Flynn reaches out and grabs the back of her jacket and without any thought she pivots on one foot and puts a quick, sharp boot into his ribs. He lets go of the jacket and doubles up over his lap and Ronnie starts edging out of the carriage and reaching for the windowsill.

Voices start to yell from every angle, riders in other carriages, people in the lower tenement windows, the crowd in line below. Flynn starts to unbelt his strap as the generator starts a run of coughs. And then it catches and the wheel bucks and starts to turn again. Ronnie’s hand falls from the sill and she yells out and grabs onto the wheel’s wooden spoke. She starts to lose balance, then swings her legs out of the carriage and wraps them farther down the strut.

“Shit,” Flynn yells. “Ronnie.”

He gets on his knees, faces backward, trying to look into the big central gears, but he only gets seconds before his carriage reaches the ground. And then the attendant is in front of him, furious, ripping open the guard bar, barking, “What the fuck you think you doin’ up there?”

Flynn jumps out of the car and pushes past her. He sees Ronnie running across the street, into the swarm of the crowd. He starts to push people out of the way and some start to push back. But when he gets to the curb, he’s lost sight of her and now, finally, the Todorov Memorial Parade is moving through Rimbaud Way. The lead float, an antique hearse trimmed with twirled black crepe paper, is weaving from curb to opposite curb, followed by a long procession of dozens of Zone insiders, all of them dressed up in heavy black robes with cowled hoods pulled over their heads, each carrying their own, tiny, individual pine box up on their shoulders and chanting in singsong, made-up Latinish babble to the accompaniment of a squad of high-stepping saxophonists wearing rubber death heads and decked out in deep purple zoot suits, blowing a frenetic version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Flynn runs out into the midst of the parade, knocking into several faux monks, sending their symbolic coffins to the street. The crowd starts to make a communal boo and a couple of the bigger monks throw a few punches Flynn’s way, but he absorbs them running, makes it to the far side of Rimbaud, and tries to break through the new wall of bodies. People poke and jab and spit on him, but he keeps ducking and moving and twisting his way deeper into the mob.

But there’s no sign of Ronnie.

He looks to his left and sees a small service alley blocked off by a blue metal garbage Dumpster. He heads for it, hoists himself up on top, and looks out over the waves of human skulls. She’s long gone by now.

He studies the parade for a few minutes, thinking this will tell him what to do, give him a clue toward a course of action. Instead, the sight just brings on more confusion. It’s as if the long line of bohemian marchers and raunchy floats and graphic novelty acts were a tribute, not to Fr. Andre Todorov, but to bedlam itself. As if the only way to truth, or even to the simple expression of loss, were through the maverick and gaudy display.

As the tail end of the parade — an authentic-looking confessional booth, all ablaze within a small orange and silver low-bed U-Haul trailer — swings around the corner onto Aragon Ave, an overamplified voice shrieks down at the crowd, “Are you ready for a kick in the ear?”

The communal attention of the street shifts back down Rimbaud and up to the roof of a renovated old church that’s now a club known as St. Anthony’s Temptation. Four young men are standing at the lip of a parapet that’s centered between two spires. They’re all wearing white dinner jackets over their bare chests and black bow ties around their throats. They’ve all got enormous boom-box radios strapped around their shoulders like guitars and behind them is an unbroken row of black amplifiers stacked a good ten feet high.

Flynn watches as they extend arms and join hands and, in unison, take a long, low bow as if their performance had just ended. Their boom boxes hang down and sway before the trunks of their bodies and Flynn thinks for a second they might be having trouble coming upright because of the weight of their equipment. But they rise in a practiced, graceful sequence and then the spokesman lifts a hand-held microphone to his lips and says, “We are Severed Artery and welcome to our free Open Channel Jam jam block party.”

Then one by one they lift a theatrical arm to their dangling radios and turn their knobs and the street is walloped with a blast of screeching feedback. The whole crowd brings their hands to their ears and a slew of people actually drop to their knees. Three Artery players look at each other with some degree of alarm, but the apparent leader of the group is sporting a huge smile, as if this were exactly the audience reaction he’d been aiming for. He raises his arms up, Bela Lugosi style, and his bandmates hesitantly follow suit. Then, again in unison, they drop their hands to their radios and attack the tuning knobs.

A bizarre and nauseating mix of unintelligible noise washes down over Rimbaud as the titanic amps howl this awful, deafening amalgam of competing sounds from up and down the band waves. There’s static and pop songs and the spoken voice, emergency broadcast tones, bebop horns, speed readers screaming car deals, a radio Mass, a radio swap meet, a high school football game, speed metal riffs, a Spanish speech with delayed translation, stock reports, Mozart’s Magic Flute, and much more static.

The group seems to be spinning their knobs in three-second intervals, one tuning randomly on the heels of the next, like some twisted camp song rounds. The volume is excruciating. And it seems to be increasing.

A wave of panic starts to break out. The mob in the street starts to disperse, but no one knows where to escape and bodies begin to collide and fall. Flynn spots a trio of skinheads trample over the back of a young girl who’s fallen. He jumps down from the Dumpster and tries to push his way toward her, but he gets knocked down himself. He takes a boot in the face and blood starts to flow from his upper lip. Another boot comes down on his hand, and fingers break. He heaves upward with his shoulder, finds an opening, gets to his feet, tucks the crushed hand under his opposite arm, and begins to run. He cuts through an alley, ends up on McJacob, and keeps moving, heading toward Bangkok Park. Away from the noise.

He runs till he’s on Grassman and he realizes the din has faded a bit, receded enough so he can stop and catch his breath. He sits down on the curb outside a small Oriental storefront. He takes his hand out and looks at the fingers, bent in unnatural directions and already swelling to the size of breakfast sausages. Blood is still flowing from his mouth and he reaches to a back pocket with his good hand, pulls free a handkerchief, and applies pressure to his lip.

His lungs are heaving and his ears are ringing a horrible, nonstop, low-toned gong. He wonders if there will be any lasting damage, if the eardrum itself has bruised or even ruptured. If he’ll be left trying to read lips and make hand gestures with his newly mangled fingers.

But on the heels of that concern, he thinks of Ronnie. And his heart gives a fresh double punch. Did she make it out all right?

And was the last thing she heard the sound of his miserable doubt?

35

V. U. Gomi Scrap and Salvage, up on Cornell Hill, is the biggest junkyard in the city. It might also be the oldest. It’s a family business, currently run by Vera Gomi, master scrapman and third-generation eccentric. Hannah has been here half a dozen times before, either haggling over parts for the Mustang or tagging along with the digging crew from the Medical Examiner’s Office. Gomi S&S used to be a favorite burial spot of the Pecci family. Don Gennaro utilized the yard as a geographic signature, a standard general warning, broadcast via the graphic Spy photos — pick and axe crew gagging, holding handkerchiefs to noses. The message was always the same and easy to understand: Do not welch when the vigorish comes due down San Remo Ave.

Hannah is sitting on the side of a doorless, overturned refrigerator, a mammoth old Frigidaire like the one she grew up with. She’s dressed in a charcoal cotton turtleneck, her black jeans, and an old navy P-coat she bought last year in a secondhand store. She’s got her department.38 out and she’s drawing a bead on various-sized rats darting in and out of piles of rusted bale wire, rushing over the black hulks of torched Chevys and Buicks. The hoods of the burned-out cars are littered with old wine bottles, probably one of Vern’s halfhearted collections. Every now and then a rat knocks a Yago sangría container to the ground. She’d like to let a round or two fly, see what kind of accuracy she can count on in this glare. But she doesn’t want to give the wrong impression to her date, the heir apparent to the newly founded Iguaran dynasty.

She closes an eye and sights down on a fat albino mother gnawing a corncob on top of a tubeless television set. She’s almost certain she could whack the rodent and she stays with it for a while, continuing to squint, following its small movements and readjusting her arms accordingly.

Then Nabo steps into her line of fire and stands frozen, not frightened, the picture of control and composure. His arms are down at his side and his posture is so erect he looks artificial, almost like one of these heavy metal appliances scattered around them. The kid is a Colombian Gary Cooper, only more threatening, more predatory, not necessarily just a protector. His huge brown eyes stare at Hannah, waiting for her to make a move, initiate contact. He’s dressed in jeans and a light leather blazer over a navy-blue T-shirt. Hannah would bet her car that he’s carrying at least two pieces under the coat, automatics, and probably extra clips in his pockets.

A young woman moves up near him, stands slightly behind him and holds onto his arm. She’s as dark as Nabo and for a second it occurs to Hannah that they could be brother and sister. But her manner of dress is pure hooker — spandex and satin and plenty of skin-piercing. She has the frightened look of a confused teenager. It’s clear she’s not used to being awake in daylight. She keeps blinking and holding a hand up over her eyes. Nabo lets her hold onto his arm, but beyond that he ignores her.

Hannah holsters her gun and thinks about starting off with a line. That’s what Lenore would do. Something like, “So this is the other woman,” or, “I knew you’d be the kind of guy to bring his secretary on a date.”

But Nabo’s eyes kill off the impulse to imitate her mentor and Hannah simply says, “You wanted to see me?”

He nods and starts to move forward, dragging the girl along like a pull toy. When he’s opposite Hannah, he positions the girl on a turned-over washing machine but stays standing.

“My father sends his regards,” he says, and gives a small head-nod without breaking eye contact. The kid has more of an accent than his old man and Hannah finds this unsettling for some reason.

She matches his formality, but it makes her feel out of balance. “Tell your father I’m grateful for any help he can offer me.”

Another nod, then he motions to the girl. “This is Mina. She works down Goulden. Out of Bedoya’s stable.”

Hannah dips her head toward Mina, but the girl looks away.

“Mina has some information for me?”

Nabo inhales and moves his hands up to his hips. “She has a story,” he says softly. “It may or may not be of use. My father said you should decide for yourself.”

Hannah looks to the girl, not sure how to play this. She doesn’t want to insult Iguaran by offering Mina cash or connections. At the same time, she doesn’t want to stray into rudeness, fail to acknowledge the gesture. What’s frustrating about this situation is how common it’s becoming, the ever-increasing subtlety of customs and traditions. It’s like the ways of the Park are changing weekly. What’s ironic is that she should feel like a native, but she never has. She works on the streets in the city where she was born and yet, since Lenore disappeared, at some point every day she feels like she’s the most obtuse tourist in the most volatile foreign land on the planet.

She turns her head and tries to study Nabo’s face for tips, but there’s nothing there. The kid isn’t vacant, it’s just the opposite — he’s so savvy at such a young age that he could already be a player. He’s not like Loke or any of the other junior lieutenants who all wear their ambition like fat gold jewelry. If she had to bet today, she’d put money on the Iguaran family to fill the power void in Bangkok. And she realizes it’s not the king who’s convinced her of this. It’s the prince.

Hannah clears her throat and says, “Let me hear the story and then we’ll talk.”

Nabo and Mina speak in Spanish for a minute, a hushed, clipped exchange. Then Nabo starts to tell about the bad john, the basement apartment, the handcuffs, the make-believe name, the history lesson. And finally, the awful baptism with la gasolina. Now and then, Mina breaks in with some clarification or additional information. She speaks in English, but only to Nabo.

Hannah stays calm and attentive, but stares at the girl through Nabo’s whole spiel. When he finishes, she asks, “Could you describe the man?”

Mina nods her head rapidly.

“Could she find the apartment? Does she remember where it was?”

This time the girl squints her eyes and gives a slow, moody shrug. Without waiting for Hannah to comment, Nabo turns to Mina and says, “Espérame en el carro,” and the girl immediately slides off the washer and runs away, disappearing behind a mountain of half-demolished TV sets.

There’s a full quiet minute as they stare at each other, then Nabo says, “It could be nothing.”

Hannah decides to be direct. “You know it isn’t.”

Nabo mimics Mina’s shrug.

“Okay,” Hannah says, “what do we do now?”

“My father would like to cement our relationship.”

“What happened to taking our time? Getting to know each other a little better?”

Nabo folds his arms across his chest. He’s more comfortable staring than talking, but he’s confident and he’s completely clear about his old man’s objectives. “My father wants to make a deal now. Tomorrow could be too late—”

“For who?” Hannah interrupts.

“We have information, Detective. We have people who …” He lowers his voice, starts again. “Bangkok is about to explode, Detective Shaw.” His voice is completely polite, almost rehearsed. “Every day that passes is crucial. You need to make sure your alliances are in place before the explosion happens.”

She doesn’t want to say it, but something forces it out.

“I’m aligned,” overemphasizing the word, “with Dr. Cheng.”

Nabo clams up at the name, looks from side to side as if surveying the value of the debris all around him, as if there were a way to get wealthy off the discarded mess of Quinsigamond’s biggest dumping ground.

Finally, he looks back to Hannah and allows what almost looks like a smile to spread on his dark lips.

“My father said you were too smart to be foolish.”

Hannah just shrugs, already regretting the mention of Cheng.

“My father said to tell you, you are smarter than your predecessor.”

She keeps her voice even and says, “Your father never knew Lenore Thomas.”

In the distance, a hundred yards away at the biodegradable mountains of rotted food, Vern Gomi’s beat old bulldozer starts making its way over the hill and begins to push multicolored piles of garbage into one large, steaming heap. Nabo and Hannah both watch in silence as Gomi grinds back and forth, sinking now and then into the muck, mashing gears as he extricates himself.

Without looking away from the hill, Nabo says, “What’s it going to be, Detective?”

Hannah gets up off the Frigidaire and rolls her head around her neck. She blocks Lenore’s voice from her head and says, “Let’s go talk to Mina about that address.”

36

Wallace moves down Paterson Ave, fiddling with the keys to Flynn’s office and trying to remember the code to shut down the alarm. Flynn gave him the keys over a month ago, but until now, Wallace has always considered this more a gesture than an invitation, a way of signifying allegiance to the surrogate father.

The keys are attached to what looks like a small suction cup, a round, slightly curved and ribbed piece of green rubber with the words

G.T. Flynn

Financial Services

You Are Protected

stamped in white lettering on the surface. When he first saw the key chain, Wallace asked what it was supposed to be. Flynn looked disappointed and told him to guess. Wallace stared at the circle of rubber and asked if it was a drink coaster and Flynn shook his head and said, “You’ve got to think symbolically. It’s a safety net. You know, like the firemen catch people in. A safety net. Get it?”

Wallace runs his fingers over the rubber “net” and shakes his head. He doesn’t like “thinking symbolically.” It doesn’t come naturally. He wishes it did, because ideas and signs and symbols seem to mean so much to all the new people. And the fact that he finds them so bothersome and, frankly, unimportant is one more unwanted hint that his era is fading out.

He stops in front of the Victorian and looks up at it for a second. Then he climbs up the stairs and across the front porch and up to the huge front door. He unlocks the three dead bolts and steps into the darkness of the office. He brings his hand to the wall, feels for the light switch, and flips it, but the room remains dark. He steps over to the alarm box and sees the red “armed” light is off, the system is down.

Wallace closes the ‘door behind him and relocks a single dead bolt, then starts to feel his way through the outer reception room toward Flynn’s office. He’ll sack out on the couch till G.T. gets home and they can talk. Flynn was raised a Catholic and he’ll understand the need for confession. He’ll feel compelled to forgive the sins of a fallen dwarf, fall into the role he plays so well — the gracious benefactor. Wallace doesn’t like this kind of cold analysis, but he’s spent a lifetime sizing people up in this way, looking for the telling inflection in the voice, the pattern in small, unimportant behaviors. There’s a way to find hidden motivations. It’s a method Wallace has honed for so long that now it’s simply reflex. He couldn’t shut it down if he wanted to. Who needs who more? Does the father require the son or is it the other way around? And suddenly he flashes on that image of Flynn as the runaway orphan, fifteen years old and gobbling down Olga’s meatballs like he hadn’t eaten in weeks, like he was some skeletal refugee, a displaced person from a vague and distant borderland, desperate not only for the spatzle and the rye bread but for the words of the deformed missionary, the dwarf in the cardigan, this mutated mirror image of the shining television dad dispensing the words of a new religion called jamming.

It’s not even a contest, Wallace thinks. The boy’ll be weeping the tears of absolution before morning. And then he can find a way to eliminate our new problem.

He steps into what Flynn calls the deal room, the place where he sells all the papers that fund the family. Wallace starts to move for the desk when he hears a small whine, the sound of a tight hinge, and he squints and stares forward to see the swivel chair behind the desk begin to turn.

“Jesus, G.T.,” he says, “you scared the crap out of me.”

There’s no response for a second. And then there’s a small, rumbling laugh, and Wallace knows it’s not Flynn.

A voice says, “Sit down,” and Wallace stays motionless in the doorway. A flashlight beam clicks on and shines in his face, runs down the length of his body. After a second, it reverses itself and shines up into the face of the speaker. Wallace wants to run, but he’s terrified to make a sudden move. It’s like having a wasp land on your arm and not knowing whether to slap it or to freeze and wait for it to fly.

Speer turns off the flashlight and comes forward in the chair, plants his forearms on the desk, and leans on them. In this new position, patches of his face become visible from the dim light outside the window. But his eyes are kept in shadow. Speer takes a clogged breath in through his nose and says, “You’re late for my dance lesson, Mr. Browning.”

Wallace stays silent, but his heart launches into its most violent pulse, as if it were hurtling toward an imminent and horrific car crash, as if it were being lanced with the longest and fattest hatpin in the world.

Speer begins to barely rock in the swivel chair, his body just slightly tilting back and forth.

“I think,” he says, “you came here to tell Mr. Flynn about me.”

Wallace shakes his head in the darkness and feels the trembling begin along his jawline.

“You need to know,” Speer says, the voice overly controlled, like a bad actor always aware of his own deficiencies, “that even if you were to be rid of me, there are others. Your kind of behavior …” He fades as the anger builds, begins again. “The disorder won’t be tolerated. Anarchy is regression. It’s weakness. We will not tolerate it …”

There’s the sound of fingers being drummed on the desktop, a rolling beat. Then Speer says, “Why don’t you sit down there on the couch and we’ll both wait for Mr. Flynn? How would that be?”

Wallace moves one foot a step backward.

There’s the sound of a long, dry swallow, then the voice is lower, more threatening. “Sit down on the couch.”

Wallace pivots and bolts. He bangs an elbow into the secretary’s desk but keeps moving, gets to the front door, turns the knob and pulls, but he’s forgotten about the dead bolt. And then Speer is behind him, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt, throwing a jab into the small of his back that drives him down on his knees.

Wallace falls on his side, tries to cover up, but Speer has a blackjack out and begins whipping it across his arms and side, and then he rolls Wallace onto his stomach, plants a knee on his back, and begins to pummel the back of the head until it’s clear the dwarf has lost consciousness.

Speer stands up and repockets the sap. He’s breathing hard and he takes a second to hunch down, hands on his knees, head lowered like he’s just finished a set of wind sprints. He sucks air for a full minute until his lungs quiet, then he reaches down and grabs Wallace by the wrists and drags his body back into Flynn’s inner office. He lifts him onto the couch, holds on to one wrist, feels for and finds a racing pulse. Then he drops down on one knee and the trunk of his body hangs over Wallace.

Speer reaches into a back pocket and pulls out the silver flask, hesitates, then brings the curved metal of the container up to his cheek and touches it to his skin for a few seconds, as if trying to cool himself down.

He puts the cap end of the flask in his mouth, bites down with his teeth, and begins to rotate the bottom slowly with his left hand. As he turns, he blesses himself, makes the sign of the cross, his right hand reverently touching his forehead, breastbone, left and right shoulders. Then he spits the cap to the floor, places his thumb over the mouth of the flask, and tips it slightly until his thumb is wetted with the contents.

He sets the flask on the floor carefully, leans in closer over the body, brings his thumb to Wallace’s forehead, and, again, traces the sign of the cross. As he moves his thumb, he mumbles, ancient and foreign words, sounds from the past.

“Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.”

He brings his hand behind Wallace’s head, gently cups the neck, and lifts the head to an angle. He reaches to the floor, picks up the flask, brings it to Wallace’s mouth, and pours a long swallow of benzine down the open, sleeping throat.

37

Flynn does something he’s never done before. He shows up at the mediation drunk. He’s killed most of a bottle of Glenlivet, not entirely to ward off the pain in his hand. He thinks he looks the part of a drunk, a classic white-collar Scotch man from the last generation. A guy with a regular after-work hangout, a place where you could eat a blood-red steak at the bar. A place with heavy wood and some brass.

He’s dressed for the part, a good example of the word disheveled. His shirt won’t stay completely tucked in his pants. His tie seems to be unraveling on its own. His hair, the showcase of his grooming habits, is winging out behind his ears, strands uniting into tufts that follow no plan of parting.

He’s playing with the TV-chassis diorama in the middle of the Anarchy Museum. No one is speaking to him. In fact, the whole room is held in a field of silence. Wallace’s old boys sit on their crates and folding chairs. They act like the place was a lazy barbershop, that they’ve assembled simply for the free copies of True Detective. Their leader has absented himself from the proceedings and Flynn takes this as a personal slap in the face and the biggest and best sign of how total a fool he’s become.

Flynn doesn’t completely understand why the old boys bothered to show up. It’s the reverse of what he expected. He assumed Hazel and the gang would come, just for the sake of one last argument, one final blast of adrenaline and namecalling and polemic.

But when he entered the museum, there was the old guard, a dozen or so decaying statues, plus Billy, the one young member of Wallace’s gang. They were all sitting quiet like they were waiting for a very late bus. And, except for Gabe, Hazel and company were nowhere to be seen. Flynn decided to wait a half hour simply because it seemed easier to sit on the floor and toy with the contents of the old RCA cabinet than to attempt the drive back home.

The fact is he doesn’t really want to be back home. He wants to be someplace different. He wants to be with Ronnie.

So why did you drive her away?

Throughout his life, Flynn has wished he could pick up a guidebook, a text, that would clearly explain his motivations, show a route from sparks in the brain all the way through speech, movement, physical activity. He wants a field guide to his own mind and desires, a primer that would treat him as an object, or better, an idea, something a method can be applied to or layered over. Like an instructional transparency. Like those Mylar illustrations in the Britannica that show the interior of the body, one sheet lying over the next, respiratory system, circulatory system, nerve pathways, connection of the bones, until a whole is formed, an entire unit, a complete body.

Halfway through his third Scotch, Flynn became aware of a simple truth that was so obvious and so pathetic that he now feels embarrassed by both its presence and his long ignorance of it. But it’s there and it’s not going away and it was Ronnie who induced its birth in his conscious, if raving, brain:

It’s not the jam. You stupid bastard. It has never once been the jam. You don’t care about the jam. You’re heir apparent to Wallace and you couldn’t care less about jamming. You could go either way. Take it or leave it. You dumb, pathetic fuck. It’s the jammers. It’s the family. The connection. You want to belong. Look at yourself. You’re the mediator, the father confessor, the counselor, banker, errand boy, historian. You want to keep them together. You want to be at the heart of the home, the center of their lives. The idea has nothing to do with it. You’re a political idiot. You’ve lied to yourself that you’re some provocateur. But you want to be Abraham. You want to be Big Daddy. You want unity and you want blood-love.

And the biggest question is: Why couldn’t you make a normal family?

Now Gabe crosses the space between them, eyes on the floor, hands pushed into his pockets. He’s dressed in the standard black T-shirt, ripped blue jeans, and high-top sneakers. Flynn watches the boy walk toward him and remembers being fifteen.

Flynn has always thought of his own childhood as a classic, if nonunique, tragedy: a compilation of archetypal images, as automatically known as that black-and-white film portrayal of the helpless widow at the mercy of the black-caped, handlebar-mustached banker/landlord/robber baron. He tends to recall his first decade in terms of snapshots: the nuns of the orphanage grouped around the head dining table, the dingy kitchen of the first foster home.

But now he feels that, even as an orphan, a displaced, exiled child, he probably had an easier time than Gabe. Because Flynn knew instinctively, reflexively, how to act the part of the integrated when necessary. And Gabe is one of those people who never will, who’ll go a lifetime just missing the markings of the franchised. He’s been betrayed by a hesitant tongue that will always recoil at the first pulses of nervousness or fear. Flynn may always feel isolated, but Gabe is a truly marked individual. His isolation is visible outside the skin, like a defective infant whose stomach developed outside the epidermis. Gabe will never be able to fake integration the way Flynn can. And they both know this.

So when Gabe comes to a stop next to Flynn’s shoulder, Flynn makes it easy for him. He pivots toward the kid and extends a hand and says, “Looks like your people have really cut and run this time.”

Gabe simply gives a sad nod.

Flynn shrugs. “Why don’t we tell the gang here to head home? It’s all over. Nothing’s going to happen here tonight.”

Gabe sits down on the floor next to Flynn and pretends to look into the diorama.

Flynn puts a sloppy hand on his shoulder. “Want to thank you for coming out here tonight, Gabe. I know it was an awful choice. And to be honest, I’m surprised. I mean, it’s no secret how you feel about Hazel.”

“You’re la-la-loaded, G.T.”

“Can’t disagree with you. But it’s medicinal. Broke some fingers.”

“I da-da-don’t think I’ve ever s-seen you loaded.”

“Well, consider it another first. We’re breaking records all over the place tonight.”

Gabe gives him a weak smile. “Na-none of this is your fault, G.T.”

Flynn shakes his head. “I didn’t exert enough force. I tried to appease everyone. I couldn’t bring the whole thing into focus.”

“What do you ma-ma-mean?”

Flynn puts a hand on his shoulder, but then lets it fall away. “I mean,” he says, louding up on the last word, “that I couldn’t make the big picture clear enough. That the reason we all end up here doesn’t have much to do with jamming.”

Gabe stares at him like he’s segued into a lost language.

“Forget it,” Flynn says, looking back at the diorama.

“Why don’t we ga-get out of here, G.T. Okay? La-let me take you out. I know a new place down in the za-zone.”

“I’ve had quite a few already, right?”

Gabe shrugs. “Sa-so one more won’t hurt. La-let me—”

And his sentence is broken off by the sound of Hazel and her group throwing open the museum’s doors and stomping into the room. It sounds like they’re all wearing jackboots. They halt into a phalanx behind their leader and she stands with her hands on her hips and surveys the room, a punk Patton juiced up on attitude, certainty, and probably a hit or two of speed.

“Son of a bitch,” Flynn yells in a voice of delighted surprise. “I knew it.”

He struggles up to his feet and yells, “The kids have come home.”

He starts to walk toward Hazel and says, “Daughter of mine, I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

She looks surprised, cranes her neck out slightly, and says, “Jesus Christ, Flynn. You’re shit-faced.”

“It’s a new look,” he says. “I was due for a change.”

Hazel looks past him at Gabe and says, “You get lost, sport?”

Gabe opens his mouth to speak, but Hazel cuts him off with a disgusted shake of her head and says, “I nailed you as a lightweight from the start.”

Flynn steps directly in front of her, face-to-face. He drops his voice, plants a kiss on her cheek that she tries not to react to, and says, “I knew you’d come, Hazel. I knew you’d remember.”

She turns her face away from him and says, “Go sit down, Flynn.”

No one makes a move. It’s like the whole room is waiting for some delayed performance to begin. There’s an edginess that’s apparent without any manifestation in sound or motion.

Finally Flynn says, “What? You’re running the show tonight, Hazel?”

She stares at him and there’s no meaning he can put to the look on her face. He hopes the booze is responsible for this. But he’d bet against it. He’s about to lose her, he knows. He’s about to lose this whole pathetic family. She’s come to make it official. There’s nothing he can do. Any impressions of control he once felt are gone. And the infuriating and heart-crushing frustration comes most of all from the fact that he doesn’t know what he did wrong. He’s always felt that at a basic, cellular level, this was a cause-and-effect world. But now something in his intestines, rather than his brain, tells him he’s been wrong. Logic and patterns and inviolable rules of force and reaction are just imposed explanations, convenient fables that comfort us if we don’t fuck with them too much.

All he can think to say is, “What did I do wrong, Hazel?”

“Knock it off, Flynn,” she says. “Don’t embarrass yourself here—”

“Embarrass myself?” he screams, and the room sits up at the volume and the echo. He’s suddenly furious. “Where the fuck do you come off talking to me like that?”

She’s trying to keep any emotion off her face. “Please, G.T.,” she says through a tiny mouth, “I have to do this.”

“Do what?” he yells, his voice elevated to the borders of a child’s tantrum. “I took care of you,” his arm actually extended and pointing a finger at Hazel. He yells the words separately, as if they were written on cue cards that aren’t being manipulated quickly enough.

“Ja-Ja-G.T.,” Gabe begins, but Flynn waves him away with his spare hand.

“Look,” Hazel says, her own volume increasing to match him, “I know everything you did for me. And that doesn’t change anything. We’re out, G.T. We’re already gone. This isn’t a game to us anymore.”

He takes a few shaky steps toward her, puts his hands on her shoulders. Eddie steps up from the background and Hazel snaps, “Take it easy, Ed.”

“This is crazy, Hazel,” Flynn says, trying to bring his voice down. “What do you do now? You start throwing rocks? You start buying weapons? This is ridiculous. What are you telling us here? You’re terrorists now? Against who?”

Hazel actually smiles, a slight, weak turning of her mouth. “Against the liars,” she says.

Flynn lets his hands fall from her shoulders. “We’re all fucking liars, Hazel.”

She shakes her head at him, a small tail of braided hair swings out and drops to her chest. She steps around Flynn and looks out at the old guard.

“The divorce is official, tell the dwarf for me.”

Billy J stands up, folds his arms across his chest and says, “If what you do sprays back at us, you’ll regret it.”

“You just remember, Bilbo, my friend Eddie would love a chance to see how far he could throw you.”

Flynn leans his butt against the television chassis. “So that’s it,” he says to Hazel’s whole group. “No meeting. No mediation. All bonds are severed. Good luck and the next time we hear about any of you it’s in the Spy. ‘QSG Studio Firebombed in Early Morning Attack.’”

Hazel shrugs.

“I could rat you out,” Flynn says, looking down to his feet, his voice on the edge of a slur.

“No you can’t,” Hazel says quietly, embarrassed for him. “And no you won’t.”

There’s a calmness and certainty in her voice that preclude a rebuttal. So, Flynn pushes his hands into his pockets and says, in a lower voice, without thinking, “What did I do wrong?”

“I’ll see you around, Flynn,” Hazel says, and doesn’t wait for a response. She turns and heads for the door and the others follow her out in a tight-knit formation, a little cluster of whispering leather. The last to squeeze out the exit is Eddie the meat-boy. Flynn notices a small old-fashioned vacuum tube hung from a belt loop of his jeans by a lancet. It bounces off his ass as he walks.

Then they’re all gone and Flynn is left with Gabe and the old guard. He wobbles to the front of them, and all he can think to say is, “Go home.”

Billy J moves to his side and takes over, saying, “I’ll call you all tomorrow. We’ll talk to Wallace. C’mon. It’ll be okay.”

They all climb off their fruit crates and folding chairs, but they move slowly, they linger a bit. It’s clear they want some explanation and assurance, a few words that things will be all right, that by morning Flynn will be sober and rational. That by afternoon he’ll start picking up the pieces.

But Gabe knows Flynn can’t give them that.

“Go ahead,” Billy says, “I promise. Wallace’ll call you all tomorrow. Everything will be fine.”

Billy leads them out of the museum and when the door bangs shut, Gabe sits down on the floor next to Flynn. The room seems enormous around them.

“Let’s ga-ga-get out of here,” Gabe says.

Flynn doesn’t move for a while. Then he brings his damaged hand up near his face and turns it from side to side slowly, inspecting the palm and then the knuckles. He lets out a low, rumbling belch, looks up at Gabe with squinted eyes, and says, “The thing is, I thought I could really hold it together. You know? I thought I had some, you know, hold over them, over all of you. The son who made good or something. Like my presence would have been enough. Like I was some kind of fucking symbol.”

“Ca-c’mon, Fa-Fa-Flyrm.”

“I thought it would just go on and on. For some reason. It seemed … I thought, like, Wallace brought me in, and I brought Hazel in, and Hazel brought you in—”

“Let’s go. La-lemme help you up.”

Gabe stands and puts a hand under Flynn’s arm and Flynn gets up, seemingly unaware his body’s moving, lost in thought, wetting his lips.

“Jesus,” he mutters. “When you’re this wrong …”

Gabe fishes through Flynn’s suitcoat pockets and comes out with the keys to the museum. “I na-know, G.T.,” he says.

They start a sloppy waltz toward the exit, Flynn letting himself lean down onto Gabe’s shoulder, Gabe struggling under the weight in a stuttering shuffle.

“About everything,” Flynn says.

Gabe nods as he pulls forward. “We’ll go da-downstairs and pa-pa-pour some drinks,” he says. “We’ll ta-ta-talk all night.”

38

The only things left in the apartment’s mini-refrigerator are half a mug of day-old instant coffee and his last three hits of crank. Speer mixes them together and tosses them down the gullet with a hard, awkward swallow. Then he sets himself up on the stool, opens his notebook, uncaps his writing pen, and turns on the Kenwood. He rolls the band indicator up to the desired frequency, then very gingerly begins to up the volume.

The room slowly fills with the sound of barking dogs, high-pitched yaps, like puppies, small-boned breeds — dachshunds, Chihuahuas, toy poodles. The broadcast seems to alternate between miking the whole dissonant chorus of barks and howls, and then spotlighting a single star, a brokenhearted crooner of untranslatable canine woes.

Speer’s head pounds. He feels like his temples have taken on a rubbery, elastic quality, that cold air is being pumped into his cranium from some unseen port. And no one’s aware of or concerned about the skull cavity’s maximum capacity of air volume. He feels like explosion is imminent. Like he could break the strongest sphygmomanometer without flexing his biceps.

But he forces himself to turn to a blank sheet of paper and write. He’s afraid the letters will blur before his eyes, but when he prints Margie, it’s completely legible.

Dear Margie,

I’ve kept my word now, haven’t I? Have you been molested? Have I tracked down your address and telephone line? Taped your conversations and photographed your comings and goings? Have men in second-rate gray suits come to your door, looked through your suitcase, asked questions about the men you see?

I don’t understand you. If you could see what you’ve done to me, if you could see how I’ve deteriorated, the thoughts that come to me now. You know what I’m capable of. Why do you want to bring this on yourself?

I’ve been patient. I’ve allowed you time. Each night I’ve returned to this apartment to find it empty. Can you possibly imagine the silence of this room when it’s four a.m. and the radio is off and I can no longer even hear myself breathe and start to think that I’ve gone deaf?

I could snap the pen I hold in two. I could picture it as your long, sleek neck and I could grope for the long line of the jugular and the rear rope of the spinal cord.

I know that when all is said and done, the papers will attempt to distort the truth in their inimitable way. I am prepared for this. There may be mentions of Oswald and Ray, Sirhan and Ali Agca. But we both know I am nothing like these pawns. I know who holds my strings. I know their purposes and so, for the moment, I allow us to use one another. But I always hold the scissors. I am more than myself now, my love. Remember how I once told you that I loved holding my weapon because it made my hand feel better than it was?

Do you?

This feeling is like that feeling. I performed a baptism tonight, darling. And I have heard the call of a new Gabriel. But this one announces death rather than life. The storm before the calm. The rapture before a divine infinity.

I will finish up my business soon, Margie. And then I will come for you.

39

“You sure this place will hold our weight?” Diane says to Eddie as she awkwardly climbs up an old rope ladder to the roof of the airport terminal.

Eddie follows her, one hand reaching up to goose her behind. “It’ll hold everyone,” he says. “Trust me.”

They’re the last to arrive. Hazel and the rest have been sitting on the roof for almost a half hour, huddling against the drizzle, whispering predictions and gossip, trying to control their excitement like greed-crazed kids on Christmas Eve.

Hazel gives Diane a hand until she gets both feet planted and gains her balance. The roof pitches at a mild angle and the asphalt shingles are coming loose from the nails in a few places. Eddie hoists himself to the top with more strength than grace. He takes a few hesitant steps up the slope, then seats himself next to Hazel. He shakes water from his hair like a clumsy but perpetually happy dog.

Hazel has an old pair of Bushnell binoculars up to her eyes. She’s looking to the west of the city, fiddling with the focus ring. They’re Gabe’s binoculars and she doesn’t think focus ring works anymore.

“You sure this is the best spot to be?” Eddie asks, pulling a can of Colt.45 from his jacket pocket, popping the top, and letting a line of foam bubble over the can, over his hands and down the rooftop in a mini-river.

“Great view,” Hazel says. “Nothing blocking us from this angle.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “It’s not the view I’m talking about.”

Hazel lets the binoculars drop and dangle on a black strap around her neck.

“I’m saying we’re not hidden at all,” Eddie says. “We’re wide open here.”

“Little fear is good for us,” Hazel says, like she’s not very interested in the topic. “It’ll keep us careful right from the start.”

“You call this careful?” Eddie asks.

She brings the binoculars back up to her eyes, turns her head slowly to the side, and says, “You’re going to have to trust me tonight, okay, Eddie? It’s real important that we see everything from up here tonight. We’re elevated. We’re away from the major part of the city lights. We’re under the stars. Vision’ll be at its best up here. It’ll make a real impression. Something everyone’ll remember. I promise.”

She hands the binoculars to Eddie and looks at her watch. “And there’s no chance of something blocking our signal,” she says. “Speaking of which …”

Eddie stares at her for a second, then catches on and wedges his Colt can in his crotch while he digs in his pocket. He pulls out a small rectangle of gray plastic that has a square red button protruding from its side and a silver antenna knob mounted at its top. There are little silver lightning bolts raised on its face below a round mesh speaker.

It’s a standard kid’s play walkie-talkie, the kind you’d buy in any mall electronics shop. It had belonged to Gabe. Like the binoculars, he was thrilled to have donated it to Hazel and the group. Hazel’s more than a little bothered by Gabe’s absence. It was clear that the kid was in love with her. What could possibly have caused him to bolt on her biggest night? She knows he felt some respect for Flynn, that he trusted him and maybe looked at him as a weird kind of father figure. But Hazel knows Gabe had it bad for her and he would’ve been the last person she’d have picked for defector.

Eddie hands the walkie-talkie to Hazel and she pulls the antenna out to full extension, then she stretches her arm out and points westward. Eddie thinks it looks like she’s pointing a magician’s wand and the feeling on the roof is weird enough so that he can imagine a cloud of smoke swarming into view with a classic fire-burst sound and a rabbit or a dove appearing in the air at the end of the antenna. But instead, Hazel just points and bites down on a growing smile.

“You have any problems I should know about?” she asks Eddie.

“This time it was cake,” he answers. “I’m not even thinking about what it’ll be like next time.”

“And no one saw you?”

“There’s nothing out there but raccoons and squirrels.”

“And driving back?”

“I was just driving. Like everyone else.”

“Okay.” Hazel nods, then leans over and puts a hand on Eddie’s shoulder, brings her head across, and kisses him on the mouth. The can of Colt drops from its wedge, rolls down the roof, and explodes onto the cement below.

“Hey,” Diane says, and Hazel looks up at her and says, “Good job. Both of you.”

She gets up on her knee, pivots slightly till she’s facing Diane, then cuffs her behind the neck, pulls her forward, and lands a second, identical kiss. Diane jerks away and Eddie can see Hazel holding down a laugh.

Hazel stands up, looks from face to face while using the antenna to scratch at the back of her neck.

“Tonight,” she says, in a voice that sounds like she’s reading from a prepared script, “we make our first big blow against the order of things. We’re about to make some pretty big confusion. And confusion is life. Confusion is antistagnation. Anarchy,” and she draws out the word, “has become a word in the dictionary. But in about ten seconds, we’re going to define it, right out loud, right up against the sky where it can’t be missed, for the whole freaking city of Quinsigamond—”

“And a few towns beyond,” Eddie says, and his mouth spreads with a weird, proud smile.

Eddie can tell Hazel doesn’t like being interrupted, that she hates having a joke spliced into this important moment. But to stop and smack him with an insult would only compound the disruption, so she nods and keeps going.

“I know you’re all clear that once the shit hits the fan tonight, it’s a new situation. There’s going to be some real consequences here. But no one forced you to come up here and sit on this roof. You’re here ’cause you’ve made a decision. And I congratulate you on it.”

She pauses, again looks at each individual face, slightly blue in the moonlight. Then, in a low, dramatic voice, she says, “So, I guess it’s showtime.”

She turns her head and extends her arm and points the walkie-talkie antenna out toward Devlin Hill, a mile west, where WQSG’s broadcast tower stands like an enormous museum piece, a classic example of industrial ego and the power of metal and height.

Everyone on the terminal rooftop stares out at it. It rises up like some enormous iron age pseudo-crucifix or the skeleton of some gigantic but primitive missile, nothing streamlined, all harsh corners and crisscrossing support struts. To Hazel, the longer she looks, it starts to seem like something more than a radio antenna. It starts to take on the feel of an icon, something with an aura of historical or even religious importance. She wonders if anyone else feels this way.

“Everybody have a clear view?” Hazel asks.

A few people adjust themselves slightly and everyone else just nods.

“Okay, then,” she mouths. “Let’s shake things up.”

Her thumb squeezes the walkie-talkie’s talk button flush to the side of the unit. About one, awful, aching second hangs. And then another. And another. The tower continues to stand tall and complete. A murmur starts to spread around the roof, a communal voice of surprise and embarrassment and confusion. Hazel looks down at the plastic box, trying to control both panic and outrage. She extends her arm out again, the magician now frantic to get the trick right, to redeem himself before the audience heads for the lobby. She thumbs the red button again and again, but the result is the same. The tower stays erect and untouched, a stubborn wall of resistance.

“Eddie,” she says, in a seething, about-to-explode voice, “what the fuck did you do wrong?”

Eddie’s behind her, shaking his head, wiping his mouth over and over with the back of his arm.

There’s a crackle of static from the walkie-talkie and then a run of distant, forced laughter from the small mesh speaker. Hazel closes her eyes and bites down on her upper lip.

“Are you there?” Loke asks.

The murmur from the rest of the group increases and Hazel keeps her back to them.

“Hazel, my love?” Loke says. “Are you there?”

Hazel stares down at the speaker and mouths the words please and no. She looks out at the tower, brings the walkie-talkie up to her mouth, presses the red button, and whispers, “Why did you do this to me?”

Then she thumbs down the volume and brings the speaker up next to her ear so no one else can hear.

“I’m afraid,” Loke says, “your request to immigrate has been denied, Hazel. I’m so sorry. But this does happen to the best of us. There are quotas to be maintained.”

Hazel jams in the red talk button like she was crushing an insect and says, “What did I buy? It sure as hell wasn’t plastique.”

“You bought shit, Hazel. That alone should show you how out of your depth you are. You should take your little party there and swim home fast.”

“I can’t go back,” Hazel says, and is shocked to find her eyes starting to sting and water. “There’s nowhere to go.”

Loke transmits a small snort, then says, “Life’s a bitch, isn’t it? You should come back down Bangkok and thank me, Hazel. I’ve given you a memorable lesson. You’ll take this one to the grave. This wasn’t a swindle, this was an education. Your own little MBA. Take the gang out and celebrate. On me. And if you get lonely, later on—”

She clicks off the box and heaves it. It sails in an arc like a weak pop-up, then comes down out on the runway and shatters into a pile of plastic shards and wire and aluminum. She brings a hand up to her eyes, presses hard, takes a breath, then begins to turn around to face her people. But before she can see their faces, before she can record the looks that have to signal something like pity, she moves to the edge of the roof and starts to climb down the rope ladder.

40

Ronnie had wanted to call it an early night, to take advantage of her one night off, maybe eat some lo mein from a takeout carton and watch the Weather Channel until she fell asleep. Instead, she forced herself to sit at a scarred and battered table at the public library and page through the more recent issues of Chronicle of Modern Media and Wavelength: The Radio Industry Weekly. She opened a notebook and copied down about two dozen possible employment prospects, then moved into the audio room, donned a pair of heavy, archaic headphones, and listened to Lulu’s Greatest Hits for about an hour.

Now, crossing Main Street and staring up at Solitary, she’s convinced she brought this feeling on herself, this sense of almost-adolescent sadness, of a kind of nostalgic ache for a city and a life she’s only known for a little over a year. She’s never been one who enjoyed playing martyr, who secretly relished her own misfortunes. But tonight she wishes she were. Like her mother. Or maybe like Flynn. Or like the callers she ministers to six goddamn nights a week, people who’ve allowed fear to strip them of pleasure and sensuality and even, sometimes, of movement. Right now, she wants to scold herself in the same unflinching manner that she scolds her faceless callers: It’s old but it still works, boys and girls, face the truth and the truth will set you free.

And the truth is that for all its griminess and decay, for all its disorder and regression and violence, she’s come to love Quinsigamond. She’s come to care for this city in a way that’s never happened to her before. She’s felt a naturalness here, a sense of not exactly contentment, but more like correctness, this Zen-like assurance that these are the streets she was meant to move through, that the air hanging over this city was destined to be filled with the ring of her voice.

And on top of that foundation came G.T. Flynn. More than anything, she’d love to be able to say that it was simply Flynn’s doubt that ended everything. Or that he meant nothing more than Yves back in Toronto, a warm body and a shared laugh, a way to pass the time during one more extended stopover. But the truth, the magic bullet of her career, the freeing agent of all repressions, the truth is that in a matter of hours she let Flynn become something else. In the glow of her own headlights, in the sway of some retro slow-dancing, like an overprivileged teenager with too much time on her hands, she let Flynn enter the realm of a possible future.

Why? She wishes there were at least some theories, some ideas about the effect of the city’s drinking water on her brain functions. Or about some chemical kicked free in her blood-stream on her last birthday. But what she hasn’t wanted to acknowledge until just now is that she sensed something about Flynn almost at once. She picked it up in the form of a pure signal, an uninterrupted line of energy, like the crazed bleating of a spastic Geiger counter stumbling onto a pile of virgin uranium.

She sensed the need, the vacuum, the total force of want. Not the simpering cravings of the average emotional cripple, but the wantings of a pro, the black hole yearning for connection that subsumes every other desire. Like her mother, Flynn’s a creature of binding, an absolute copulator, a high priest of the drive for communion. His doubt was never the product of disinterest. Just the opposite. He needs complete coupling, seamless unification. He wants to be twinned in the way other people want money or immortality. And that kind of raw, ongoing want can bring someone to the edge and then nudge them over.

Just like my mother, Ronnie thinks.

She steps into the elevator and presses for the seventeenth floor. If I felt the signal, she thinks, if I remembered the consequences, why didn’t I run out of Wireless? The truth is: I let this happen.

She lightly slaps herself in the head with the notebook that holds the names of twenty-five radio stations, all of them thousands of miles from Quinsigamond. A couple of them in Europe. One in Jerusalem.

The elevator deposits her on her floor and she digs out her keys and lets herself into the apartment. She’ll have to talk Vinnie into an extra night off this week. He can give Ray a double slot, her going-away present to the most amusing fascist she hopes she’ll ever meet. There are dozens of things to do. Get the updated resume and stat sheets reprinted. Set up a rush job with a modeling agency and photographer — she thinks she’ll be a blonde this time out, design her next face in the form of a neo — Marilyn Monroe type. The furniture rental company will have to be called. And then there’s the ritual sorting of the cassettes, the junking of the disposable sound crap, and the trunk storage of the tapes she’ll take out of Quinsigamond. She’ll make lists, slide into her organization mode.

But not tonight. Tonight she wants one more round of balcony hedonism. So she changes into her kimono, grabs the mescal and the last of the gourmet Swiss almond fudge ice cream, and moves out onto the lounge chair, determined not to think about Flynn. Or her mother. Or the odd and annoying attachment she’s somehow developed for this dying factory town. Tonight she wants simplistic input, the taste and texture of the liquor, the fudge, the ice cream. The feel of the cool fall breeze over her legs.

She opens the sliders, moves out on the balcony, eases down into the lounge, and immediately feels something beneath her. She reaches around and pulls up a notebook — a generic, spiral-bound school model. It’s opened and the covers are folded back on themselves. The exposed pages are filled with writing, heavily inked block letters done with a felt marker. For a second she thinks Elaine, the cleaning lady, must have left it out here. But Elaine normally comes on Tuesdays and Fridays. And the handwriting doesn’t strike her as female.

Ronnie brings her legs up, positions the notebook against her knees, and starts reading from the open page:

… Here’s the intersection where you meet these jammers, Margie. You’re both aberrations of nature. Do you recall the nature shows I used to watch? Untamed World and the others? You’d never watch with me. But what I saw might have helped you, Margie. The images I took in might well have saved you from the awful path you now find yourself walking. At some point in all of those shows there would be a dramatic, often slow-motion scene of a predator and his prey — let’s say a jackal and an antelope. And we could see the toned, bulging muscles of the jackal as it darted down some dusty slope. And we could see the antelope buck and panic and run. But the antelope never gets away, Margie. And eventually we must see the inevitable scene of the jackal’s jagged teeth slicing into the antelope’s soft neck, tearing open the throat, holding tight like a reinforced vise until the antelope slumps into a pile of its own weak death.

The jackal did nothing “wrong,” Margie. You do realize this? The jackal was simply stronger than the antelope in a variety of ways. His reward for his strength is, first, sustenance, and second, but maybe most important, the sustained order of things.

My job, Margie, is to keep order. It’s what I’ve been put here to do. How could you spend almost twenty years with me and not be aware of that?

The problem with you and these radio criminals is that you opt for chaos in the desperate, mistaken hope that you can topple the natural order of things. You hope that somehow you can confuse people into calling weakness strength and vice versa. Your goal is to reduce all of history to some pathetic and abstract linguistic argument.

I am here, very simply, to see that this does not happen.

Ronnie moves the notebook off her knees and lets it drop to the floor. Her brain is starting to race a bit and she absent-mindedly takes a long swallow from the mescal.

Could belong to the handyman, the maintenance guy, what’s his name, Dave something? But what the hell was he doing in the apartment? I didn’t call in for any repairs.

She gets up suddenly and moves to the railing. And as she looks down to the street she spots all the normal clusters, all the separate night groups that have made up the landscape this past year — the Dumpster scavengers, the gay hustlers, the hooker twins, and the corner dealers. But tonight, this time, for the first time, they all seem to be looking up at her, unblinking, totally focused on the seventeenth floor of Solitary, as if some vision had corralled their collective attention, as if God’s own drive-in movie were showing on the face of the building.

Ronnie turns and runs inside to the phone. There’s no inbuilding security, but the bank that’s holding the note provided her with a twenty-four-hour number to call in case of emergencies. And though she doesn’t know what she’ll say when her call is picked up, it’s starting to feel like an emergency is coming on, like she’s just felt a warning tremor that could signal the big quake.

She fumbles with her address book, presses the phone to her ear, and starts to dial the first numbers, then stops, presses the hang-up button, listens, presses again, then again. The phone is dead.

She grabs the Jeep keys off the kitchen counter, runs to the hallway, and thumbs the elevator button. She’s peppering to herself the standard C’mon, C’mon, when the hallway’s ceiling speakers come alive, not with the slow, narcotic Muzak they were designed for, but with a voice, a low, slightly raspy male voice. A classic radio voice, someone who could speak with authority and anger in the middle of a sleepless night.

The voice says, “Veronica.”

She cringes and wheels around, but the hallway is empty. Her heart starts to feel like a massive and endless bee sting.

The voice says, “Veronica, it’s time to wipe the face of your savior.”

She starts to run, moving south, turning corners and zagging with the curves of the hallway.

“Veronica,” the voice says, following her, coming at her from above, “I’m here to absolve you, show you the error of your thoughts. Take the chaos from your heart.”

On impulse, she turns to a door and grabs at the knob, but it’s locked. She continues down the hall, which seems longer and more angled than she’s ever remembered, like a maze, a futile labyrinth without an exit.

“Veronica,” now a yell, a harsh rebuke.

She grabs another random doorknob and turns and this one opens. She steps into a dark, bare unit of blueboard walls with unfinished electrical wiring jutting from small square holes and hanging limp like dying, atrophied arms. She runs through the living room into a rear bedroom. She goes straight for the closet, steps inside, pulls the door closed behind her, and sinks to the floor.

She knows this is exactly the wrong thing to do, but she doesn’t move. She pulls her body in, shoulders hunched up to the knees and arms wrapped tight around her legs. She starts to rock slightly on her behind, as if she can’t control the movement. Her breathing starts to go wrong, too much air coming in, no exhalations. She starts to feel both dizzy and nauseated, starts to wish she could make the closet smaller, pull the closet down on top of herself.

Muffled, as if the words were being spoken into a pillow, she can barely hear the ceiling voice out in the hall. She can’t make out any words beyond her own name, but the voice is booming, ranting, elevating into some kind of apocalyptic tirade, an anger of limitless proportions.

And it starts to sound like her mother’s keening in the middle of the night, her mother’s wrenching sobs and grunts, her mother’s air overloaded with the helpless misery of the insane. And all Ronnie can see is the dark wall of a trailer in Gainesville, Florida. Twelve years old and folded in on herself, lying fetal on a skinny bunk in the dark. Pretending to be Anne Frank. Pretending the monsters, the voices, are going to storm through the attic door and end the waiting.

And then there’s silence. The muted bellowing has stopped. She waits for what seems like hours, tries to calm the breathing, tries to hold off the nausea and the waves of absolute panic. She strains, listens for the bark of her name.

But there’s nothing.

She comes up into a sitting position, presses her palms against her forehead for a long minute, stays still, and counts her breaths. She stares down at the bottom lip of the closet door, thinks about staying here, silent, rigid, just breathing, until she can see morning light under the lip.

Then, without thinking, she rises and pushes open the door. And screams at the sight of his face.

His skin seems tinged yellow and his eyes seem enormous, the whites a horrible pattern of red branching lines against a bleached-yellow backing. There’s an oily skim-coat on his forehead and his lips are pale and tightened across the run of his teeth.

She tries to bolt around him, but he grabs her by the wrist. Immediately, she swings her free hand up to hit him in the face, but he catches that wrist as well. And they stand there like petrified dance partners.

She holds herself rigid and he brings his face up close to hers and whispers, “Don’t fuck around here, Veronica.”

She tries to prevent a huge, gulping swallow, but it happens, anyway. Speer doesn’t try to move her or hurt her, he just holds her in place by her wrists, his tongue darting out of his mouth a few times, moistening the patch of skin below his nose.

She could scream again, but she knows there’s no one to hear her. And it’s likely both her wrists could be snapped in one movement.

“I know he was at the station with you the other night,” Speer says, clearly having difficulty keeping his voice in control. “I know he was right there next to you while you did your filthy show. You don’t know what you’re involved in here. You’ve got no idea. You picked the wrong side of the fence. And that’s not my fault. Your stupidity is not my fault. Sooner or later you’re going to have to realize that.”

He takes a stuttering breath and then his head drops to her neck and he begins to kiss her with a wet, open mouth and too much pressure. And then she feels his teeth and this controlled, limited biting begins. It hurts, but she stays silent, eyes closed.

A phrase comes to her that she hasn’t heard since high school. Love bruise.

And then he’s finished. She knows in the morning, on her body, warm or cold, there’ll be a round, brown mark on her neck, a sign that the night really happened.

He steps backward. His face is shining with sweat. There’s a foolish, limp grin on his mouth. He waits a moment, looks her up and down, and then in a movement that’s so fast it seems at odds with the man’s bulk, he steps to the side, releases one of her wrists, bends the other behind her back, pulls a set of handcuffs off his belt, manipulates her down to her knees, and cuffs her wrists together.

Then he pulls his revolver from a holster inside his wind-breaker and holds it up in front of her face, sideways, not pointing the muzzle at her, more like it was a visual aid, an advanced show-and-tell item. He grabs a handful of her hair at the back of her neck, gives a sharp tug until her head is aimed at the ceiling.

He bends down, brings his face next to the side of her head, pushes the tip of his tongue into her ear, and then swallows and whispers, “We’re going to see Flynn now. And if you give me any problems, I’ll put this gun in that filthy mouth of yours and turn you into a goddamn bonfire.”

41

Hannah takes the china teacup from her lips, swallows, and says, “There’s no way to tell someone what ginseng tastes like. They’ve got to try it themselves.”

Dr. Cheng nods to her and smiles, then places his cup back on the saucer that rests on his bony knee. “You give your friend Ike the recipe for the kelp soup with ginger. Two weeks, you’ll both feel like new people.”

They’re sitting in the living room of Cheng’s apartment above his herbarium. It’s a tiny place where he’s resided for over fifty years. The apartment is laid out like a modified bungalow or railroad flat, with three rooms running front to back. There’s a small galley kitchen at the head of the building, followed by the living room and a tiny bedroom with grass-cloth walls that contains only a bamboo trunk filled with coolie gowns and a thin straw mat that the doctor has used as a bed since the day he moved in.

In contrast with the bedroom, the living room is cramped and filled with all Cheng’s worldly possessions. The walls are lined with shelving on which rest hundreds of old, threadbare books, moldy leather and vellum and snakeskin volumes, their spines lined with Oriental characters. Alongside the books are various-sized mason jars filled with cloudy liquids and vague vegetablelike forms, things pickled and pruned and toxic-looking. There are no labels on any of the jars and Hannah wonders if the doctor has ever made a fatal mistake, dispensed a poison instead of a remedy, ended a life rather than saved one. She decides this is probably unlikely. Or at least it’s never happened by accident.

Hannah has never deceived herself about Dr. Cheng. This kindly old man serving her tea and inquiring about her friend’s health is still one of the deadly crime lords of the city. This humble-looking man has amassed a lifetime fortune off the opium trade, gambling, extortion, prostitution, political fixing, and very likely, murder for hire. She also knows that if their purposes crossed and a mutual resolution looked unlikely, neither one would flinch while going after the other. Cheng could have her neck snapped as easily as he serves her ginseng. And Hannah knows, if her back were against a wall, she could pull her Magnum and whack the old man with little or no hesitation.

And yet, they genuinely like each other. They find one another’s company pleasant and informative and beneficial. Hannah thinks that Cheng views this contradiction the same way she does. They’re both players in a machine that neither can completely understand. And they know that machine runs on the brutal and rigid laws of both business and nature. If those laws conspire to pit Hannah against Dr. Cheng, they’ll act accordingly and not waste time debating the nature of fate and free will. In the meantime, they’ll enjoy ginseng tea and quiet, often enlightening conversation.

The building is quiet. Downstairs, in the front of the shop, two of the doctor’s muscle-boys are playing a dice game at a small folding table. They nodded to Hannah as she came in the rear entrance and went up the wooden spiral stairwell to Cheng’s apartment. Unlike the doctor, the muscle-boys were dressed in double-breasted silk suits. She has a feeling that Cheng might order his staff to dress this way, a pointed contrast to his peasant attire.

Hannah is dressed in pleated black woolen slacks and a black leather blazer over a red silk blouse that she knows the doctor loves. Sometimes, when they’re sitting like this, talking quietly, segueing easily from subject to subject, roots and bark and herb medicine giving way to money movement and new players in and out of the Park, Hannah wishes she’d known Cheng fifty years ago, in his prime. Even then he was a committed bachelor, a weird Triad monk, married only to his vision and his plotting. At night, at home in her apartment, Hannah has caught herself once or twice wondering what it might have been like if she and the doctor were contemporaries. Could they have become lovers? Could she have seduced the lord of Little Asia into a very different kind of partnership, something beyond the bonds of importation fees and opium distribution? And if she did, whose world would they have moved into? Could she have made the crossover into full-blown Bangkok residency, no longer just a semi-untouchable envoy, not the one cop with the knowledge and connections that translate into a permanent visitor’s visa, but a woman with Park citizenship, an official denizen of Quinsigamond’s underbelly?

The fact that she’s not sure of her answer is what makes it difficult to broach the subject she came here to discuss — what to do with Fr. Todorov’s murderer. Hannah doesn’t want to clash with the old man. She knows that for all his pleasantries and hospitality, he’s uneasy with her presence here. She doesn’t want them to have to walk opposite sides of the street. But she knows Dr. Cheng has ideas about tradition and consistency. And she knows those ideas could conflict with her own plans.

She takes a breath and says quietly, “I owe you for tracking down the benzine, Doc. I hope it didn’t cost you too many favors.”

Cheng takes a dull silver coin out of the loose sleeve of his gown and begins to roll it around his fingers with the skill of a carnival pro. Hannah knows this is his lucky quarter and that the sight of it usually means a serious and possibly not-pleasant discussion is about to begin.

“I’m long on favors, Hannah. And please remember that identifying the priest’s killer was in my best interest. Little Asia functions best outside the glare of the spotlight. The last thing we needed was more ranting and raving from the Brothers Grimm.”

Hannah laughs. “The Brothers Grimm” is Dr. Cheng’s pet name for Mayor Welby and Chief Bendix.

“It seems to me, though,” Cheng continues, “that we both still have a problem. When dealing with insects, identification is never a substitute for extermination.”

Hannah’s smile fades. She tries to make herself speak slowly and maintain a friendly demeanor.

“Then we do have a problem, Doctor. I’ve got a source that says this guy was a Fed. Now, he was bounced eighteen months ago. But I still can’t let you pop a Fed—”

Cheng interrupts with an even, low voice. “You saw the remains of the priest, Hannah—”

Hannah knows where he’s heading and cuts him off. “That’s exactly right. That’s why we need him breathing. We need him squirming on the courthouse steps, sweating for the Spy cameras. Everybody needs closure on this. I swear, it’s best for business to do this my way.”

“This Speer,” Cheng says, pursing his lips and hesitating as if the name had caused a sour taste to form on his tongue, “attempted to incriminate my people—”

“Doc, this is the Hyenas we’re talking about. My people? Back at the cathedral, you were the one who said Uncle Chak was trying to squeeze out from under your thumb. For six months you’ve been telling me the Cambodians want to splinter.”

“Certain traditions are never ignored, Hannah. You know this.”

“Doc,” Hannah says, trying to cover her exasperation, “you’re contradicting yourself here. This bastard was a Federal cop. You whack him Asian style, you’ll have the press down here for a decade. This is exactly what the Colombians want. Don’t give it to them.”

“The Colombians are the least of my concerns, my dear.”

The words my dear have an odd ring, somehow more threatening than endearing, but still a mix of both. She ignores the tone and presses on.

“I need to make myself clear here. I’m not sure you understand me. I need to speak with the man. I need to sit on him for a while. I need to do things to him in order to know what he knows. I need to know exactly what happened at St. Brendan’s. Why this guy popped the priest. And why he did it the way he did it. What’s his bitch with the Hyenas? How is he tied into Bangkok? Did he have a connection with Uncle Chak that hasn’t come clear yet?”

Cheng opens his thin lips to speak, then appears to change his mind. The coin disappears back into the folds of his gown. He clears his throat and in a brand new tone he says, “Would you care for any more tea, my friend?”

There’s no threat now, but also no intimacy. It’s suddenly as if she’s some tourist who wandered into the wrong noodle shop. The discussion has ended and the patriarch, at least in his own mind, has won out.

Hannah shakes her head slowly for a long moment and then whispers, “No more tea.”

They start to rise from their seats. And from downstairs comes the sound of glass shattering. Instinctively, Hannah draws out her gun and turns toward the spiral stairs.

She glances back to see a slightly confused look on Cheng’s face.

“It could just be a glass,” he says, and she’s shocked at his words.

Call them, she mouths.

Cheng composes himself, then cranes his head toward the staircase and yells, “Kuhn, Lui, are you all right?”

They wait for an answer and when none comes Hannah crosses into the kitchen, her Magnum up parallel with her head. She steps slowly onto the ancient tile floor and leans until she can barely get a view out the window in front of the sink.

It’s the landscape she had feared and expected: Across the street from the Herbarium, sitting on the roofs and hoods and trunks of their Trans Ams and Shelby Mustangs and customized Firebirds, she counts eighteen Angkor Hyenas. Pulled prominently in front of all of them is a metallic-blue Corvette convertible. Loke leans against the passenger door. In the moonlight, his face seems to glisten a bit, as if he were overheating in the cool of this November night.

Hannah thinks the whole scene resembles some glossy, stagy performance piece, more suited to the Canal than Bangkok, some baby-boomer dream of ethnic, urban thuggery, all ready to be set to music. She turns back to the doctor and says softly, “Looks like Uncle Chak is making his move, Doc. He’s got a dozen and a half boy scouts outside.”

He nods to her, his face showing nothing.

She wants to say, I’m sorry, but settles for, “You’ve got a piece in here?”

Dr. Cheng can’t help but smile. The warmth and feeling flow back into his voice and he says, “Fifty years, Hannah. I never had to carry a gun.”

Before she can stop herself she blurts out, “The myth has lost some power, Doc.”

With her free hand she reaches down to her belt, grabs her backup piece, and extends it toward him butt-first. Cheng is shocked and wildly amused. He waves the weapon away and says, “Will you never learn a sense of tradition, daughter?”

Hannah’s touched by the term, but annoyed by his passivity.

“I’m not going to just hand you over to these dicks. They’re errand boys. They’re wet punks, for Christ sake. They’re not worthy of sweeping your walk.”

Cheng is looking at all the books and herbs that line his walls. He says, “Remember, Hannah, in the end, it’s always your own that come for you.”

She despises his acceptance of the situation.

“These bastards aren’t your own, Doc. I knew Chak was scum the first time I saw the little shit. I should’ve popped him then.”

“Go now,” Cheng says.

“Like hell.”

“They know who you are. They’ll let you leave.”

“If they know me, they know I’ll never let them whack you. They know they’ll have to go through me.”

Cheng shakes his head. “I tried to tell you not to come. I tried to—”

“I can’t believe you don’t have some shooters on standby. Just those two downstairs?”

Cheng crosses to her and puts an arm on her shoulder and she realizes the old man has not only been expecting this but maybe even imagining how it would take place, what the schematic of the assault would look like, which direction his enemy would come from, what time of the night they’d choose to visit.

More glass shatters on the floor below. Hannah tucks her.38 in her rear waistband, shakes her head at Cheng, slips out from under his arm, and moves for the stairs. She keeps her back to the curve of the rail going down. Before she reaches the bottom she can see the two meat-boys on the floor, sprawled at awful angles, their heads both wrapped in green trash bags, suffocated just like it spells out in the Tuol Sleng torture manual. The bodies are covered with broken glass. The front display window and the glass pane in the front door have been shattered, broken inward, and in the midst of the splinters and shards covering the shop floor, Hannah sees two silver ball bearings, slightly larger than gum balls. It’s a favorite Hyena signature, normally used as a warning flare to shopkeepers slow to pay their protection fees.

Outside, the street is sickeningly quiet and motionless. The Hyenas stand rigid, staring at the storefront as if posing for some painfully slow sculptor, as if caught by some Canal Zone artist’s Hasselblad, a full-color frozen epic on the nature of looming threat. Hannah would like to toss off some demeaning comment about how they resemble bony-faced male models, beef for hire recruited for a retro music video, ready to prance and sneer and insinuate ideas of teenage sexuality and ego and half-understood romance. But the fact is that the figures momentarily paralyzed in the artificially deserted street are the real creatures, true gangster meat, more than capable in the ways of murder and vengeance, sadism and power. They’re the advance guard, Uncle Chak’s psychotic marines, proud and honored to strike the first blow against the old order of Little Asia, replaying in their born-cynical brains every promise Loke has made to them concerning status and money and their place in the future of Bangkok Park.

Hannah holsters her Magnum, steps over the Glad-bagged head of one of Cheng’s failed shooters, and moves to the front doorway. She knows Loke can see her and that it’s a fairly good sign he’s allowing her to advance. She takes a breath, opens the door, and steps out onto the sidewalk. On the far side of the Firebird, she sees three Hyenas, arms braced against the roof of the car holding what look like Vz58 assault rifles. She knows she’s already lined up in their sights.

She takes two slow steps to get off the sidewalk and onto the street, keeping her hands and arms raised slightly like a priest at a key moment of consecration. As she moves, she keeps her head faced straight toward Loke, but her eyes do a quick sweep of the whole picture and she sees these bastards are loaded. They came for the old man with their best hardware and it now looks like a detailed illustration of overkill. She spots a set of four Hyenas behind the Trans Am drawing down on her with a string of semiautomatic pistols, probably Tokarevs smuggled from back home.

Four more little shits, a couple who look to be about fifteen years old, are kneeling at the rear of a Mustang, absolutely stiff and sweating over the shafts of their light machine guns, maybe RPDs. Nosed in near the front of the Mustang is a customized El Camino whose bed is filled with five Hyenas carrying various small arms — pistols, rifles, and shotguns.

Stationed in front of this semicircle battalion is Loke’s Corvette. Standing uncrouched at the trunk of the car is Loke’s lieutenant, a simple.38 Colt Diamondback protruding from his belt line, a lesson in subtlety compared with the rest of this crowd.

And then, on the other side of the car, out front, in line with the shop entrance, no barriers dividing him from Hannah, is Loke. It’s his big night, the graduation and diploma he never managed to extract from Yale. He’s slightly looser than his charges. He’s completely motionless, but his spine is a bit slack and he’s got his ass leaning against the car’s hood. His arms are folded across his chest and Hannah can’t spot any weaponry, but she does notice a new tattoo that she knows he didn’t have when she visited the arcade. Though it’s November, Loke is dressed in a stretch white tank top and on his pumped left arm, in black ink, is an intricate picture. From this distance, about seven feet, Hannah sees what looks like a big black patch, like a latent birth-mark that’s suddenly come to the epidermal surface with a fury. But if she were closer, if she could hold and examine the arm the way a lover or a doctor might, she’d see an exquisitely detailed depiction of some obscure, primal architecture — a re-creation of a wonder from Loke’s homeland, a carving of a grinning Bodhisattva. A god’s face as it looks upon violent death and random destruction. A face that can only grin at some ongoing spectacle of human suffering.

As Hannah studies Loke, she comes to see him as a changed man. It’s clear he genuinely believes that tonight is the beginning of a position, a career, a life he’s been dreaming of and waiting for. His posture alone reveals a message. She thinks he looks like a cross between an Oriental cowboy and a method actor with maybe a little post — James Dean rockabilly hood thrown in. He’s actually greased his hair back like an early-Elvis Brylcreem model. Hannah thinks he should have dangled a hand-rolled cigarette from his lips and parked a backup behind his right ear. She can see Loke understands that image is half the battle. That he knows power and position and sex and a hundred lesser commodities are first and foremost a condition in the brain, an ability to create an agreed-upon atmosphere. What she wishes this kid could see is that Dr. Cheng understood the same thing fifty years ago. And the fact that this understanding can’t alter your demise when the fated time arrives.

Hannah takes a few steps until she and Loke are about a yard apart and he barks, “Enough.”

She stops moving and says, “I’m impressed you managed to clear the street. These buildings are filled with his people.”

Loke can’t help a small smile as he says, “They used to be his people.”

She stares into his face. “You really think Chak can pull this off?”

“It’s a foregone conclusion, Hannah.”

It’s clear he enjoys using her first name and she smiles to acknowledge his pettiness.

“I know your car is parked in the alley,” he continues. “You can walk to it unmolested. Some of my uncle’s people will be contacting you in a few days.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Hannah begins, but Loke cuts her off with an even voice and says, “Just shut up and leave now. You look back here and one of my people will cut you in half.”

Hannah keeps herself from spitting out some smart-ass insult. Instead she matches his control and says, “How would Uncle Chak feel about that? First days of any administration are tough at best. You and your uncle both know I’m connected with most of the other neighborhood mayors. You whack me in tandem with the old man and they’re all going to wonder what kind of family has taken over Little Asia. They might even sit down and discuss Chak’s résumé—”

“You’ve got an inflated sense of self-worth,” Loke says, but Hannah knows what she’s said is more truth than bluff and Loke can’t risk making a stupid move tonight.

They look at each other for a few seconds and Loke says, “Go bring out the old man. We’ll make it painless.”

Hannah lets a laughing breath out her nose and says, “No, you won’t. You’ll take his head off his neck while he’s still alive and you’ll put it on a spike for everyone to see. You can’t pass up a signal like that. It solidifies the grab in everyone’s mind. It’s the first and best sign of the new order.”

Loke rises up off the car and says quietly, “Give me your gun, Hannah.”

She holds an unblinking stare as she pulls free the Magnum and surrenders it.

Loke accepts the weapon, then in the same low voice says, “Go get the old fucker, Hannah.”

She shakes her head slightly and says, “I can’t do that.”

But now Loke is looking past her, smiling again, and he mumbles, “It seems you don’t have to.”

Hannah turns her head to see Dr. Cheng standing in the doorway of the Herbarium, looking out on the street with a gray, now-ancient face, looking, more than anything else, small and stooped.

“Oh, Doc,” Hannah says to no one, and her voice surprises her by coming out as something of a whine.

Loke yells across the distance to the doctor, “I’m glad you’ve decided to join us. I promise no one will harm you.”

Hannah considers a grab for the Magnum. It’s possible she could drop the lieutenant at the rear of the Corvette, maybe even get Loke in front of her as a shield. But she knows these kids are so pumped and tense they’d probably squeeze off a barrage before their leader could call them off and she and Loke and the doctor would all be an indiscriminate pile of shredded flesh and lead-shattered bone in seconds.

Cheng starts to move off the sidewalk in this awful shuffle step, looking down at his slippered feet and saying, “You go now, daughter,” in a loud rasp that sounds nothing like his voice.

Hannah turns slowly, making sure she doesn’t move her arms from their raised position. She bites off the words that come from her mouth: “Get back inside, you stupid bastard,” but he keeps coming toward his death as if he hasn’t heard her, as if her body didn’t exist here in the street, the only force between himself and the certainty of a bloody and somehow embarrassing death.

The old doctor comes up next to her and stops moving, looks Loke over from boots to skull, then looks past him to this teen death squad overloaded with imported weapons, a few probably juiced on a quick premassacre crack-smoke, some seeing the legendary Dr. Cheng for the first time.

They look back on him with neither reverence nor contempt, but something like bewilderment. This is the man their uncles and grandfathers spoke of? This little toad is the man they spoke of, in whispers, at the markets and during the domino games? This man, in the ridiculous old robe, the hands and face so lined and wrinkled, the feet in slippers, for Christ’s sake?

And for the first time, Hannah can’t believe it either. And in that instant it becomes clear to her — the absence of any defense, the absence of that small army of loyal shooters ready to sacrifice their own lives and rip up the entire Park before letting any harm come to the doctor, the absence of a presumptive hit on Chak when he missed the monthly summit. At some point, she knows now, the doctor looked in a mirror and saw what the Hyenas are seeing now — a small, very old, very tired man who’s been condemned to a rare and awful fate: Dr. Cheng has outlasted his era.

And Hannah is suddenly overwhelmed with the weight of the old man’s self-knowledge. It’s a heinous destiny — to outlive your relevance to the environment, to overstay your welcome in the life of your street.

It’s as if a raging flu virus has infiltrated her body in a passing second. Her stomach goes and her joints seem to swell and her knees and neck weaken and she’s engulfed with a spasm of nausea and dizziness, as if she only now understood that this scene, this event, was happening around her. A moment ago it was a movie or a math problem, all instant calculation and clockwork deduction, the summing-up of distances and the assessment of firepower and the varying rates of probable speed. Now she understands why Cheng is walking into the mouth of the dragon. Now she remembers that she has never been a citizen of either the Park or the city proper, but a woman always in orbit, an eternal exile chronically passing through.

A run of bile starts to rise up in her throat and she gulps air and forces it back down. She stares at Loke and feels Cheng’s hand on her arm, actually pushing her away, trying to shove her off the site.

A horrible smile spreads on Loke’s face and then there’s Cheng’s voice near her ear, repeating in a softer croak, “Go now, daughter.”

And she decides to pull the.38. To blow that miserable fucking smile off Loke’s face. In that instant, it’s worth her life to plant a bullet in the center of his mouth, to explode the lips into minute scraps of pulp, to shatter the teeth into calcium dust, tear the pathetic tongue free, sever tonsils, rupture infinite capillaries, dynamite an exit crater through the rear of the skull that will obliterate forever that smug, ego-soaked, self-satisfied grin.

But as her arm begins to move, the street erupts with the sounds of shrieking tires and crack-stoked war cries and the pop and bang of an incoming blitz, a ground-level strafing, cruising in from the south. And suddenly the Hyenas are bailing off their cars, leaping to the ground, scrambling for new positions, screaming the whole time in Khmer and releasing their own barrage of gunfire.

Hannah butts Dr. Cheng to the ground, rolls and draws the backup gun, and faces the oncoming assault. It’s a platoon of Granada Street Popes barreling down Verlin Ave in candy-apple red Jeeps and wide-body fat-wheel pickups and a single beat and blown-out low-rider Chevy, all of them loaded with every gaudy option they can steal. And the Popes are pumped for blood and mayhem. This isn’t a hit-and-run drive-by. There are too many of them. Hannah spots six vehicles, each with a driver and three shooters in the bed. They’re here for elimination. They’re here for a last gamble on exterminating the Hyenas.

It’s a genocide carnival. The Popes sling their vehicles into a V-shaped wedge, then roll out to the ground on the far side, a flashy bunker to shoot from. It’s clear this isn’t a spur-of-the- moment offensive. Their moves seem integrated. There’s no suicide charge and no friendly fire. They’ve been trained and outfitted by the new mayor of the Latinos. Iguaran.

The Hyenas were ready to waste a ninety-year-old herbalist, not fight a do-or-die campaign. All they’ve got now is adrenaline jolt and the fact that Little Asia is home field. It’s not enough. The Popes begin lobbing smoke grenades and one lands in the Corvette and as a gray fog gets into the air, a long run of syncopated assault fire tears across the Hyenas’ front.

Hannah rolls back on her stomach, does an awkward lifeguard’s grab around Cheng’s chest, and drags him inside the doorway of the Herbarium. The old man is choking on smoke, but he seems unharmed. Hannah comes up into a sitting position and looks out the shattered storefront window. Through the smoke she can see that the three kids in the Firebird have bought it — their bodies pushed onto their backs by the barrage, their weapons useless on top of them. One kid’s hand is blown off.

The rest of Loke’s soldiers are trying to hold the line, returning blasts that pock the sides of the Jeep wall, but do nothing to reduce or even contain the enemy fire. They jump up from behind their cars in random spurts like pinballs popped from an electrified cup. They’re screaming the whole time, seemingly at some unseen force above them in the air. Their heads do a stutter-shake as they scream and fire. Their unified howl is both furious and horrified. More than anything else, they seem to be yelling for help or instruction, their heads whiplashing toward Loke and back to the fire line, as if their high-pitched, terror-clogged yelps in Khmer translated to do something, save me.

Hannah grabs the front of Cheng’s gown and pulls him close to her face.

“My car’s around the corner. At the head of the alley. We can make it out.”

She knows she’ll need the doctor’s cooperation. They won’t get two feet out the door if he balks or squirms in any way. But the old man seems beyond assent or objection. Hannah’s not even sure he’s following her words. He seems to be looking past her, out at the smoky fireworks in the street, like he was trying to memorize, permanently implant, the shrieks and roars of agony and panic and disbelief that make it around the muzzle blast and now, suddenly, the blast of music from what must be the Popes’ car stereos. They’ve got their stereos synchronized to a single station or tape. And Hannah understands at once that they’re mind-fucking the Hyenas, showing their Cambodian victims that this is more a party than a war, a badass blood dance to savor and celebrate.

The music is some kind of south-of-the-border post-salsa tune, all spliced up with machine-gun percussion machines and weird jungle-bird sounds that mutate into screeching, Gillespieish, bebop horns. Almost Tito Puente, but crossed by John Cage. It’s like a new-world, multiethnic cacophony. Tribal, but juiced with electricity. And it’s absolutely appropriate as the sound track to this bloodbath. The Popes are tearing into the Trans Am brigade, almost as if they don’t want to kill the poor bastards just yet but make them linger on the border of death, anticipating each bullet that infiltrates the hull of the car and the asphalt around their feet.

Hannah reaches down and takes Cheng’s hand, brings it straight to her mouth, and bites into his flesh. The doctor screams with as much surprise as pain, jerks the hand away, and Hannah sees the trickle of blood rising up to the surface. Before the old man can recover his thoughts, she grabs him by the gown, locks his arm inside her own, pulls out her gun, and lunges out the doorway in a crouched run.

It’s only about five steps around the corner to the alley and her momentum brings Cheng along without any hindrance. But as they turn into the alley, there’s Loke seated on the hood of her Mustang with Hannah’s Magnum in his hands, arms extended out from the line of his body, drawing down on them. Loke has taken at least one hit in his left thigh and his pants leg is saturated. The kid’s eyes look glassy and after a second his arms start to waver a bit. Hannah takes sight on him, center chest, but as she squeezes the trigger, Cheng bucks suddenly and brings his shoulder up into her shooting arm. Her bullet sails high and impacts off brick. She loses her balance, goes down on a knee. It happens in an instant: she tries to step around Cheng and resight the gun, but Loke opens his mouth, lets out a yell, and squeezes off rounds, a run of discharge, four shots. Four bullets from Hannah’s own Magnum. And she watches the old man knocked onto his back by the blast, his black gown spurting red, a hole exploding in his neck.

She jerks her head back toward Loke, swings her gun up as two more shots sound, but this time from behind her. The upper half of Loke’s head explodes, the body lifts and flies backward onto the car, then slides off the hood and crumbles downward.

Hannah turns to see Nabo, Iguaran’s son, still posed in a weird, profile shooter’s stance with his right arm fully extended and his hand gripping a customized sawed-off.

Behind him, where the alley empties back to the street, a half dozen pools of fire have erupted and the combined glow backlights the shooter. It takes a second for Hannah’s eyes to adjust and by the time she can get a bead on him, she knows there’s no need to. If he wanted to kill her she’d be dead already.

She watches him slowly lower the stub of a shotgun until it rests against his leg. He’s wearing a dark oilcloth raincoat and it gives him the look of some silent and foreign cowboy sucked out of his time frame, transported from the pampas to Bangkok Park for the sole purpose of a mass bloodletting.

Hannah tenses as Nabo reaches to his belt and pulls out a fat buck knife. He brings the knife to his mouth and opens out the blade with his teeth. Then he begins to walk down the alley, sawed-off still next to his leg. Hannah keeps her weapon up, ready to fire. But he moves past her and kneels down next to the half-headless body of Loke. He lifts the slack right arm by the wrist and for an instant Hannah thinks he’s actually feeling for a pulse. Then his intentions are vividly clear: he takes a grip on Loke’s dead hand, brings down the buck knife, and cleaves away the thumb. He puts the thumb in a pocket of his raincoat. The proof and the reward. The Park equivalent of the scalp. The ear of the bull.

As he wipes his blade on Loke’s pants, he stares at Hannah and from this new angle she can make out his features. He’s even younger than she’d thought and there’s almost a softness around his eyes.

“The Hyenas,” she says, and flinches at her own voice. “Are they all dead?”

He pauses for a second, and she thinks he’s unsure of whether or not he should speak with her. Then he gives a single nod and says, “Just about.”

She looks away from him, down to Cheng. She reaches out and pulls his head into her lap, can’t think of what more to do, and so simply covers the blackening hole in his neck with her hand.

Nabo stands up and angles himself away from Loke’s body. He says, “You’re free to go.”

Hannah sits still for a minute, continues to stare down at Cheng’s head, uses her free hand to fully close his eyes. Without looking up, she says, “The old man knew it was coming. He saw everything about to give way. A lifetime of work.”

Nabo walks to her and extends a hand to help her up. She ignores it.

She says, “Save your strength, boy. All fucking hell is about to break loose. Everybody splinters now. Everyone’s on their own. Every shithead with a gun or a bomb makes his move now—”

Nabo clears his throat, spits on the ground, and says, “Once Cortez left, war was inevitable—”

And Hannah cuts him off without raising her voice. “This isn’t war, dickhead. This is chaos. This is regression.”

Nabo reaches down, grabs her arm roughly, and pulls her to her feet. Cheng’s body rolls to the ground, lands facedown, displaying the gaps of his exit wounds. Hannah breaks the grip and gives Nabo a hard shove. He bounces back a step, lifts both his hands to shoulder height, lets a smile come over his face. In a low voice he says, “Easy, chica. I know who you are. Everything’s all right here.”

Hannah spits in his face, but he continues to smile. He brings a sleeve of his coat across his cheek and says, “You come down to the abattoir in a month. The Park will be back in order. Iguaran will put things right.”

Hannah shrugs out of her jacket and places it over Cheng’s head and back, covering up the wounds. She comes upright and says, “His people will want the body. You make sure it’s here for them.”

His smile fades and he swings his sawed-off up onto a shoulder. Hannah thinks he looks like some old cigarette advertisement, an image from a fading billboard. A static picture from some forgotten fable of the West.

She turns away from him and starts walking out of the alley, toward the smoky gleam of the street fires and the stench of gasoline and freshly slaughtered Hyenas.

42

Gabe takes Flynn’s keys and locks up the Anarchy Museum, then leads the way downstairs to Wireless. The place is in darkness. Ferrie and Most have gone home for the night. Gabe steers Flynn into a side booth, turns on a single blue-tinged light, grabs a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two water glasses from the bar, plants a twenty in the register keys, and moves back to his friend.

The booth is a big wooden monster with a black, worndown gloss and what looks like fifty years’ worth of names and numbers carved into the table. Gabe pours some bourbon and watches Flynn work a small maroon penknife. Flynn goes about inscribing with the care of a diamond splitter. He’s hunched over the table, his face close, down near the wood, his free hand pressed flat for balance and his writing hand moving deliberately with steady pressure, the blade cutting in deeper than the average carving. The problem is, he’s too drunk for the task. The knife keeps slipping out of the working ridge. Gabe sees this as a little dangerous, but he knows that suggesting Flynn stop would only prod him to bear down more.

Gabe doesn’t know what Flynn is writing. He doesn’t want to ask. If Flynn wants to reveal the inscription on his own, then fine. Otherwise, Gabe will stay in the dark. He’s never seen Flynn drank before and it disturbs him more than he would have expected. He’s seen him a little relaxed, a little loose, making his way through a weekend Wireless crowd, buying rounds and tossing back a few himself. But in those instances there was always a feeling that Flynn was holding more control than he let on, that his conviviality was planned, something close to a method, a practiced technique for putting others at ease, for creating a clannish, bonded atmosphere.

Flynn lets the penknife fall from his hand as if he’s instantly grown bored. He sits back in the booth with a little too much force and his head bangs against wood. He doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes are fixed upward staring at the old tin ceiling. He goes a long time without blinking, then, when the eyes finally do close, they stay that way and he begins to talk.

“When I was in the Galilee Home. When I was a kid. Long goddamn time back, like, twenty-five years now, okay? Twenty-five years. Quarter century, right?”

“Long ta-ta-time,” Gabe says.

“Goddamn right. Long time. I had the nuns. They ran the home, you know. Old nuns. You couldn’t guess how old. I’d try to guess. No way. You’d just go blank. You’d just sit there. Every number you’d think of, you’d go — unh-uh, older than that.”

He goes quiet for a second. The eyes open but stay fixed on the ceiling. He licks around his lips.

“They had this old, this ancient projector. Movie projector. Big gray monster. Bell and Howell. Weighed a ton. I used to carry it. Well, I tried to lift it once. Must have been, you know, I think now, must have been an old eight-millimeter. The big sprocket holes on the side. Every year at Christmastime, they’d haul out the projector. Put it down on its old rubber stub legs there, you know. This is after dinner maybe, still at the tables in the dining room. Always dark in the dining room. Guess they thought it was good for movies. So they’d put a big screen up in front of the room and they’d run this movie. Same freaking movie every year I was there. This cheap Life of Jesus movie. Practically a filmstrip thing. All narration. People on the screen, these actors, who were these people? These actors dressed up in these kind of robelike clothes, you know, rope belts and all. Sandals. They’d be playing, like, Mary and Joseph and Jesus. Well, Jesus is on the way, right? She’s expecting. She’s pregnant with God and all. And it’s the old story, right? Heading for the census, looking for a hotel, no room at the inn. The whole thing. Some guy with this Boris Karloff voice narrates the whole thing. Standard Christmas pageant thing. Holy family in the manger. I used to watch it. Every year, okay, same time. ’Bout a week before Christmas, bang, the old nuns in black haul out the projector and there’s Mary and Joe knocking on doors, no vacancy, the water’s about to break, hit the barn, lie down in the straw, the animals all around. I always expected the Karloff voice to do a cow. Give us a big mooo, Boris. Never happened.”

He brings a hand up to his forehead, leaves it there a second, then brings it down over the eyes, nose, mouth. It comes to rest, flat on his chest, like he was ready to say the pledge of allegiance.

“So one year I’m watching the movie. And something hits me. Something different. Little light flashes on in the brain. What do they call it? Kick in the eye, you know? Little epiphany. I’m watching it this one year, just like every other year before and, for some reason, this time something goes snap inside and I realize, for the first time, I realize — I am pissed. I’m angry. I’m furious. This kid being born in the barn, he’s got your standard mother and father. He’s got your basic family. And I’m in this dark dining room with these half-nuts old women in black who have us on our knees first thing in the freaking freezing morning. And I got no mother. And I got no father. And I reach down on the table and grab hold of my vanilla pudding dessert and I throw the fucking pudding up against the screen. I mean I haul off and pitch the goddamn pudding. I hurl it, okay? I pelt it. Fastball. Freaking bullet. And it splatters all over the movie, all over the wrapping in swaddling clothing and the shepherds all kneeling around on straw and the big freaking light from the star in the corner of the screen. And some of the pudding hangs there on the screen and some of it sort of rolls down in little, rubbery jumps, down the screen and falls to the floor.”

They sit silent until Gabe can bring himself to ask, “Wawhat’d they da-do to you?”

Flynn finally looks down from the ceiling and stares at him like he can’t understand the question. Then he says, “What do you think they did? The closest one grabs hold and beats the piss out of me.”

There’s a few more seconds of silence, then Flynn adds, “Tell you something, though. They never showed that goddamn movie again.”

Gabe nods slowly and sips at his bourbon. Flynn turns sideways in the booth, brings his feet up onto the seat, and lets his head loll back into the corner till it looks like he’s getting ready to take a nap. He folds his arms across his chest and tucks his hands up under his armpits and says slowly, “You’re not a lightweight kid. Bitch never should have said that.”

Gabe stares into his glass and just as slowly says, “Paplease don’t ca-ca-call her that.”

Flynn shrugs but he can’t help but press. “Why’d you stay with me, Gabe? You’re out of your mind about her. Why’d you stay with me?”

Gabe meets Flynn’s eyes, swallows, and says, “’Ca-cause we bu-bu-both wanted the sa-same tha-tha-thing.”

Flynn seems to think about this for a second, then brings his hands up to his face and rubs at his eyes. He talks as he rubs. “I’ve been thinking lately, okay? About all of us. About everyone at Wireless. All the jammers. I was thinking, it looks to me like we’re all missing something, or we’re all slightly, you know, off. We’re all marked a little.”

“Sa-sa-’cept for ya-you.”

Gabe doesn’t know why he’s said this. All he wants is for this awful night to end the only way it can. He wants simply to finish the drink, turn off his brain, and walk away. But something opened his mouth. Something pulled the words out.

“I’m not marked, Gabe?”

Flynn’s voice is a little high and rough.

Gabe shakes his head. “Not outside, na-na-no.”

“And that’s what counts?”

“Makes a big da-difference.”

“Maybe not.” The voice lower now, even threatening, the preamble of an argumentative drunk rolling toward a sloppy fight.

But Gabe can’t stop it. He can’t get past the fact that there’s something completely wrong with this moment, that the roles are being played totally wrong. That it’s Flynn who should be doing some consoling and showing some strength. And he can’t help knowing that for all her faults, at least Hazel had strength. Especially at the end. When it counted.

So he says, “Maybe not? How can you la-look at me, ta-ta-tell me it doesn’t ma-ma-make a difference? Ja-Ja-Jesus, Flynn. You are normal,” his own voice raising now and he doesn’t care. “La-look at yourself, the way you live and dress and act. The ca-ca-color of your skin, the shape of your bubones, the money in your pa-pa-pocket. Wireless. The j-jammers, it’s all a fucking ch-choice for you. It’s a fucking j-j-joke.”

Flynn sits rigid, his lips pulled so tight together they begin to turn a bluish purple shade. And then out of nowhere his hand comes up from his lap, grabs his water glass, tosses his bourbon into Gabe’s face, lets the glass fall to the table. He grabs Gabe’s T-shirt and yanks the boy into the table’s edge. Flynn pulls back a fist, but instead of letting it fly, he hesitates, takes a breath, lets go of Gabe’s shirt, and sinks back in the booth.

Gabe sits dripping, still shocked by the speed of both the outburst and its termination. Finally, he takes a paper napkin from the dispenser and begins to dab at his face.

“It wasn’t a joke,” Flynn says in a shaky voice. “Don’t ever say it was a joke.”

Gabe shrugs, shaken, maybe even ready to cry. He refuses to make eye contact. He looks at the wall clock and says, “Ma-maybe we should sa-say ga-good night.”

“We’re saying more than good night.”

Gabe shrugs again, but makes no effort to respond.

“Don’t try to tell me how I feel, Gabe.” The voice is low and taut as if the sudden burst of anger has killed off some of the booze.

Gabe reaches for another napkin and says, “I think mamaybe you d-d-didn’t understand—”

“Shut up. Right now. Just shut the hell up. Don’t you dare presume to tell me how I feel. I didn’t misunderstand a thing. You don’t know me, Gabe. You don’t know how I feel or why I do what I do. And I never knew that until just now. And it’s a shitty thing to learn. But once it’s clear, once you see it—”

Gabe starts to slide out of the booth, but Flynn grabs hold of his arm.

“You’re sca-sca-scaring me here.”

“Good. Perfect. That’s what I want. You stay scared, Gabe. You stay fucking petrified—”

“I gotta ga-ga-go.”

“’Cause I made up a picture where none of us were ever scared and that was bullshit. And I made up a picture of Hazel where she was always grateful and always needed me. And I think tonight I’ve got to clear up all these misconceptions. I want to stop lying to myself, you know, Gabe. I made up this myth. I’m such a mother of a salesman. I sold myself. Like I plunked myself down into my imported leather customer chair and gave myself a Class A spiel. Top-shelf hustle. I should bronze my freaking tongue. And I bought into it. Completely. Whole package. I was signing the check before the last pieces were in place. That’s the funniest part, okay, that’s the rim shot, right there. I was as good a customer as I was salesman. I climbed into the palm of my own hand.”

“Pa-please,” Gabe says, straining to get free, but Flynn has both his wrists pinned down on the tabletop.

“I’d made it up. It was a simple goddamn lie. Well, not simple. Complicated. Really intricate. Lots of pieces, all fit together, from a lot of different directions. That’s a myth, right? That’s what I did. That’s what I’m trained to do. What I’ve practiced at all these years. I sell people the myth of security. Talk to me. Talk with Flynn. Or let Flynn talk to you. You pay me and your world cannot fall apart. It’s in the contract. Guaranteed. Like that Cajun chef says, you know. I guarantee. See, son, Daddy bought long on the myth of the family. Myth of belonging. Myth of the clan. I took all these random stories and put them together. Like train cars. Linked them up, car after car, one long line, all coupled together.”

Gabe suddenly stops struggling. Instead he gives a long, bored sigh and says, “Sta-sta-stories?”

Flynn wobbles a bit in his seat and loosens his grip.

“Yeah. Absolutely. You got your story of Flynn meeting Wallace Browning. Little kid meets this fascinating character. And he’s a dwarf, okay, could it get more perfect, straight out of a fable, you know. And the dwarf has got a secret. Enter and sign in, please. And the dwarf will share the secret with the boy. Show him how big it is. A whole world. The jammer’s world. And the dwarf teaches the kid, right, you got the apprentice story there. The kid is chosen so the craft gets passed on. Down the line. Like the train cars.”

He lets go of Gabe’s wrists and sinks back in the booth. They stare at each other. Flynn clears his throat and waits to see if the boy will run. But Gabe just continues to stare at him, so he lowers his voice and continues.

“So, time comes, roles start to change, Flynn has to pick a kid. Continue the line. Keep the story going. And he doesn’t have a kid of his own. So, one night he meets Hazel. And bang — the story rolls on.”

He lifts up his glass to his mouth, then realizes it’s empty and puts it down.

“But here’s where the story twists. Where the surprise ending starts to explode. Ready? Flynn has one of those satoris. An epiphany. One of those instant enlightenments. It happens just when all the train cars start to uncouple and the fucking thing is ready to derail.”

Gabe stares at him, waiting for the story to finish.

“He figures out, too late, there’s the irony, he figures out that the craft never really mattered to him. It was immaterial. Moot point. The jamming was just a by-product, just this excuse. The politics behind it were meaningless to him. The philosophy behind it. He just loved the connection. The binding. Just wanted the feel.”

Gabe slides out of the booth, stands in front of the table rubbing his wrists, and seems to look past Flynn.

“I’m the original idiot, Gabe. Took me over twenty years to figure out something that simple.”

In a bored voice, Gabe says, “There are a lot of ways to have a fa-family, Flynn.”

Flynn closes his eyes and gives a small laugh. “Jesus, did Hazel train you. Made you into a big free-will man, huh? Will it hurt too much if I tell you Hazel’s a deluded little bitch?”

“Fa-fa-fuck you,” Gabe says, without much force behind it. “I never should have ca-come here tonight.”

He turns and starts for the exit, but Flynn keeps talking after him.

“You fall into things. They take hold of you,” he starts to yell after the boy. “Things take hold of you, Gabe. Things come after you.”

The last words are a whiny rasp and Flynn brings a hand up to cover his face, then at once he brings his hand down, picks up the bourbon bottle and pulls a long draw from the mouth. He turns his head and looks for a long time at the radio mounted at the end of the table against the brick wall. He stares hard, trying not to blink, as if sooner or later he’ll notice something about the machine that he’s never seen before.

He puts his hand on top of it, then reaches to the side knob and turns on the power. A dull yellowish glow lights from behind the dials and band selector. It’s a soothing light, dim but warm. He keeps the volume low and starts to turn through the AM frequencies until he comes to WQSG.

There’s a moment of static, but he’s neither disappointed nor worried. He puts his hand back on top of the radio and waits.

Then the static starts to cut in and out, to splice itself with flashes of dead air and then with flashes of high-pitched squeal. And then the brothers start to speak to him:

Showtime, brothers and sisters. And in the beginning was the word. And the word was made into electro-magnetic signals that could fly through the air. And the word was brought to live in the box. And the word was interrupted by a message from your sponsor.

We’re back for one last curtain call, friends. As you probably know by now, things haven’t exactly worked out as we had hoped. Live and learn, right? It just takes some of us quite a while to figure out the simplest lessons. Like old Saint Ti Jean’s role model used to say — You can’t go home again. I don’t know why that is exactly, but it doesn’t matter. The point is, don’t try to screw with a modern proverb. This is brother John O’Zebedee broadcasting a little mission of mercy. As everyone in earshot knows, a lot of big dominoes fell tonight. The karmic wheel was busy as a Benzedrine beaver, and the O’Z boys aren’t real enthused about the slot she came to rest in. But that’s the thing about the wheel and where she stops. You can’t buy her off with money or good intentions or human sacrifice.

You know, gang, about five years back, Jimbo and I got a little bored one night and took a shot at a radio-play production of Rebel Without a License. Neither one of us does a very good Dean, but we did learn a hell of a lot about the medium. The biggest thing we learned was that there was a pretty good-sized group of individuals out there that for one reason or another felt very left out. And they seemed to tune into us by instant instinct. And just that act of listening to us, all at the same time, linked them up a little, made them part of something bigger than themselves. And there’s a real charge in that idea, a real flash, a real feeling of union and maybe even transcendence.

But this life doesn’t like transcendence a whole goddamn lot. And five fucking years can be a long goddamn time when you’re living in a car in the Mexican desert and the nights get colder than a well digger’s ass, excuse me, Mr. Waits. From where I sit now, everything that happened five years ago seems like some undertaker’s bad dream.

Shit and onions, boys and girls, and about ten tons of it appears ready to hit the industrial fan tonight. We understand things didn’t work out quite as planned for our gal Hazel. And I guess my brother and I have a little disagreement over her plight. See, I say what Ms. H wanted to do was just another round of infantile violence that changes nothing but our capacity for humor. But James says that there’s always a little blood shed and bone shred and metal bent during the course of a revolution, that more than one redcoat took a farmer’s musket blast so that you and I could live free in the land of the brave.

I don’t know who’s right tonight, folks. I just know this: the saddest salesman since Willy Loman is watching his myth deconstruct right before his ears.

I don’t know what to tell you, G.T. I’m just the voice in the box, the ghost in the machine. I’ve got no more answers than you do and I’m not even half the salesman. ’Cause I could never believe the way you always could. I still can’t force that kind of surety on myself. My brain won’t allow it. Maybe it’s a genetic problem. Who knows?

All I can do is pass on information. And there’s really no gauging what that’s worth. You be the judge: the eternal agent of enforced order has finally made his way to our fair city. And he’s classic madman material, G.T. Grade A nut case. His name is Speer, he’s leaking paranoia juice everywhere he walks, and he’s got the rage levels of a career speed-head. Hair-trigger temper. Sadistic imagination that would make Sade envious. But that’s not the big news, Mr. F. The latest intelligence is that the psycho is also a fraud. He was retired from the Federates over eighteen months ago. They gave this demon a fifty percent pension and told him to walk. Which is just what you want to do with an agent who’s got twenty-five years of shooting bunker and interrogation skills and now faces the gates of hell every morning and prays to Genghis Khan.

I wish I could give you better news, my CFP/CLU hombre. But better warned than happy. No one on-line seems to know where Mr. S is tonight. But he’s a pro when it comes to tailing a wanted man. And you fit that description for him. He seems to think you’re the endall and be-all of the jamming movement. The messiah of microphone mischief. The glue that holds the communication anarchists together. We may know better, but sometimes there’s no talking with a delusional fascist. All night, I’ve been chewing on the question of why he didn’t come after James and me. And I think I’ve got a possible answer. We’re not of his world. He can’t even see us. But you, Mr. F, you dress the part. You walk and talk and function like an integrated citizen, a franchised model of belonging. And I don’t think he can live with the fact, the paradox, that you turn your back on the franchise every night and strike pranksterish little blows against the order. The order you seem to embrace by day, the order that seems to be set up to make it easy for someone like you. We’re not here to slag you, G.T., but I guess I’ve got to say, I’m sort of forced here to say, that I see how the agent’s mind works. He sees the picture of you, granted it’s all external, but it’s an external world, G.T. We make judgments and carry out the consequences every freaking day based on nothing more than what our eyes flash on. And that first flash says you’re a white, upper-middle-class, attractive, educated, assimilated, nonhandicapped, hail-fellow-well-met. If the system we’ve been calling Quinsigamond, or hell, even America, is set up for anyone, honey, it’s set up for you. What the agent can’t see is that, obviously, something inside is different or broken. It has to be. Why else Wireless and the sound-effects clowns? Why else bite the hand that feeds you? So, what’s the internal difference, G.T.? If it were just anger, from whatever longago reasons of powerlessness, I think you’d have been with Hazel tonight, singing that old Drifters tune. We can’t help thinking it’s more a need than anything else. A Want with a capital W. That inside the Armani suits, you’re as hollow as the St. Louis banker in his green face paint.

What are you thinking right now, G.T.? Are you thinking — none of this two-bit pop analysis is helping me any right now? You are correct, G.T. So maybe it’s time for us to fade out. You have our last message. This Agent Speer is on his way. Anyone with half a brain would know where you could be found. So, forewarned is forearmed, I guess. And to some extent, the rest of this story is up to you. You’re not the only one listening tonight. There might even be a radio professional or two tuned in. Maybe a woman of grace and wit and humor and strength. Maybe someone like that could save your yuppie ass. I dunno.

See, the trick is, you’ve got to place faith in someone like that. You’ve got to go outside of yourself. And experience tells all of us that when you do that, nine out of ten times, you get screwed in a way that lingers. But the alternative is absolute self-reliance, and with some apologies to Mr. Emerson, that’s a system that, taken to the limit, has its own kind of side effects. You don’t have to be a lawyer to know the law of diminishing returns and being completely alone can suck every bit as much as betrayal. I think, anyway.

So, dig in, G.T. You’ve got some advantages. You know the lay of the land. You’re on home court, so to speak. Remember the Jimi Hendrix theorem: Feedback can be an art, too. We’d love to stay and see the credits roll, but time is short and windows narrow. If you walk away intact, drop us a line by Tristero. And if you happen to dharma-bum it out onto the road with a lascivious navigator, listen for our signal. Here’s a big hint: grab a copy of Ti Jean’s Flashes of Moriarty and read close when you get near the end — just after where the Saint places a bet on Blue Foam … Who knows, G.T., we could meet again. I’m outta here. And brother James wants to say goodbye.

I’ll make it short and semisweet. No man’s a prophet in his own town. And in Quinsigamond, he’s a regular outlaw. I can’t blame the men in blue or the station owners. They were just playing their parts. But you guys, the so-called faithful, you let me down. You needed a voiceprint to believe in O’ZBON. And that takes all of the magic out of it. I guess doubt is like a bell: once you’ve rung it, you can’t call back the chime. It runs off, vibrates outward, touches more than it should.

So, now the heat is on. And as soon as I finish changing the plugs and oil, we’re gone again. I guess maybe we were more than a little naive to think we could come back to the plains of former glory. It’s just a bitch that our last night in the old hometown had to be such a family feud. Personally, I disagree with John-boy. I think Hazel’s heart was in the right place, even if her planning was a little shortsighted. If I know anything, Hazel, it’s that you’ve got to sink your pilings deeper into the ground if you want your house to stand for the long haul. But who am I to judge? My brother and I are coasting on discount gas and prayers to Marconi. Like all parties in bohemia, this one was swell while it lasted. Unfortunately, I’ve got a feeling the big broom is being taken from the utility closet as we speak. And we want to be mobile before the janitor spots our debris.

Remember this, gang. There’ll be other parties. The pendulum will swing back one of these days. In the meantime, play the blues and prop each other up. And to you, G.T., I guess you’re going to have to go for the balls. Sometimes you’re left with no other option. That’s the thing about this life. Your options almost always narrow down.

When you’re young, there’s always someone warning don’t burn your bridges. What they fail to tell you is that those bridges are going to catch the spark anyway, spontaneously combust, and the light that inferno throws off will only illuminate your failures and dead dreams. And you go on kidding yourself there’ll be other ways back home, other ways to start again. For Christ sake, we live in the land of the remake. Head west. Change your name. Find the frontier and a new life. It’s supposed to be a metaphysical Homestead Act. But at some point you come to understand, in one of those blinding flashes of satori, that there just is no way back. That the landscape has changed and warped and eroded so much that not only are there no bridges but there are no goddamn roads, there’s not even a way to turn around and have a clear vision, to get a fix on where it was you came from.

I think that when we were bunked down in Baja and Juan got the yearning to head back this way, I think even then I knew better. But you know us local boys, suckers for a good story and a long shot. Fine. Call me a cynic. But what does that make all of you out there who doubted us, called us frauds and weak imitations? Even old Uncle Elmore had to go thumbs down. Well, the truth is, we are the real thing. And I don’t give much of a damn tonight who believes what. But, like the original vagabond said, folks, don’t think twice, you know. Here’s the mike, bro, let’s hoover some petrol and see if we can’t make the northern border by nightfall.

Well, friends, it’s that time. We’re wandering bhikkus, once again. Hometown boys make bad. But like I always knew in my soul, what’s the sense of being from Quinsigamond if you don’t know that sooner or later it’s going to break your heart? Hic Calix.

43

The radio falls back to a blast of whiny static for a good ten seconds, then it turns to dead air. Flynn just stares at it, tries to concentrate, as if he can will himself toward sober. Within seconds, he’s unclear on a lot of what was said. He knows the O’Zebedee Brothers addressed him directly, but he doesn’t find this unusual or alarming. These guys know their audience. They know Wireless and they know all the main players. He’s sure they mentioned Hazel. He knows they mentioned the name Speer. And he thinks they may have made reference to Ronnie.

But even this drunk, Flynn isn’t enthused about taking life advice from radio ghosts. And besides, whoever the O’Zebedee Brothers are, they’re leaving town. One more myth that the city will have to live without. It’s possible these boys have the right idea, that now is exactly the correct time to cut losses and run, pull the money out of the bank, gas up the Saab, spend some time in transit. Flynn can suddenly picture it, checking in and out of Ramadas and Holiday Inns, identical franchised rooms, always set off the interstate, their signs visible at night from the shoulder of the highway. He can imagine spending his days in the dim seal of mall cinemas, tiny cement boxes with bad sound and miniature screens, all identical, all showing the same features. Spending his nights back at the hotel lounge, learning to love generic vermouth, teaching his body how to sustain itself on a diet of olives and bar nuts. Experimenting with a new form of small talk, boozy gab time with farm-belt tractor salesmen and local divorcees, corn-fed women with good teeth and a flinty reserve of pride, adamant not to show their disappointment in this life.

But then, interrupting this picture, without warning or reason, comes the image, the real memory, of dancing with Ronnie. He can see that night at the airport, everything set in the smoky-blue beams of the Jeep’s headlights, the lights of Quinsigamond down the hill like an endless pattern of connections, the sound of that late-thirties saxophone just on the eve of bebop, still melodic and moody. And the feel of Ronnie’s hair against his neck, the feel of her arms weighted on his shoulders, the smell he can’t completely define, maybe coconut or vanilla. And the feel of her mouth, the movement, first the softness and then the wetness. And finally, her body pushed into his, so achingly slowly, still aligning its movements with the music from the radio, but just barely, just an imitation of the slow dance now, building into something else, the embrace that involves more than the arms, that draws both their full bodies to each other through their clothes and constructs a rare, flushing heat, a warmth that somehow avoids the idea of temperature, of measurement, and instead becomes a binding force, like magnetism or electricity. And there is an ache to it, but no pain, a deepness that persistently vibrates, that floods into the subconscious in pulses and tells the brain to sublet its functions, to give over to a primal, prerational sensation. The feel of Ronnie, this entire presence, against his body, moving.

Why is that feeling so important?

Because it means something so far beyond the immediate sensation. Because it suggests something that Flynn can only vaguely name, a general, imperfect word like possibility.

And what is it that’s possible?

First, the desire to be absolute flesh. And then, everything else—union, communion, community. The possibility is that words like these can take on meaning in the here and now, can evolve beyond vague and ghostlike icons, beyond the juiceless drone of dry, cold theory. The possibility is that these sounds can become observable action: he and Ronnie, for example, one example, bound into each other and the world.

Flynn’s dizzy with the thought. He feels unreal and light-headed, on the threshold of trance or dream or nausea. He looks around at the dull glint of the hundreds of curios and knickknacks mounted on walls and shelves and bartops, all these jigsaw pieces that make up this bizarre world of Wireless like the topography of a stubbornly elusive dream. And he hears his own voice, his unique noise, out loud, from his own throat, ask, “What the fuck is it I want?”

And from the speaker of the table radio comes the whisper, “You want to avoid me.”

And Flynn comes out of the logy dream state and into a wave of terror that breaks on his body in the form of a classic, unstoppable shudder. There’s a beat, the vague sound of wind, then the voice goes on. “But that’s not going to happen, Mr. Flynn.”

He climbs out of the booth and does a stumbling run for the men’s room. He pushes open the door, slides onto the tile of the bathroom floor, and catches a look at himself in the mirror. He turns to the row of green metal stalls, sees a pair of loafer-clad feet protruding from the last toilet. He steps forward, his stomach seizing up, his head flushing with a rush of heat.

He looks and sees a stunted body propped against the porcelain bowl. Lifeless, the head unrecognizable, that horrid, everlasting image of burned flesh — all hair gone, the skin seared away in uneven layers, the lower, remaining tissue left a shocking, unforgettable, somehow violent pattern of shadings, mainly deep purples and reds gone the tone of mediumrare steak.

Oddly, the rest of the dwarf’s body looks unburned. It’s just the head that’s been torched.

Flynn stares a woozy second and says, “Wallace.”

Then he falls backward, his shoulder slamming against a sink. He rolls on his side as all the Scotch and bourbon in his gut comes jetting upward, and he begins to vomit and heave. When his stomach empties, he pulls himself to his feet and runs from the john back into Wireless.

The radio in his booth has come alive again. But this time, the voice is familiar. Ronnie is yelling, “Flynn, get out.”

Then there’s a bleat of squealing static, a bite of sound track for a moment of implied violence, and the first voice returns, a bit out of breath, saying, “Yes, Flynn, come out of that dark barroom and get some fresh air. It’s a gorgeous night. Wonderful air. You come join us. Up here on the roof.”

Flynn does a sprint for the stairway, turns the corner past the entrance to the Anarchy Museum, and bolts up the dark enclosure that leads to the roof of Wireless, He shoulders open the tin door and comes out into the night.

He stands still and looks to the opposite edge of the roof. There’s a large, meat-faced man with a slicked, modified crew cut plastered away from his face. The hair is a pepperish color. He’s dressed in a zip-up windbreaker with a fleece collar that’s turned up around his neck. He’s wearing black slacks that end too high on his legs, exposing white tube socks and low-cut discount-looking sneakers. The man is a classic barrel-chested type, like some midwestern football coach who built his body tossing hay bales and swimming in always-freezing creeks.

His left hand is dangling at his side. It grips a large white plastic microphone with an enormous red-foam head, a domed top like a clown’s nose. The microphone looks like a child’s toy or a forgotten prop from a cheap old movie farce, some slapstick where people are constantly colliding and falling down stairs.

The man’s right arm is bent and resting on Ronnie’s shoulder. His right hand grips a gun that’s pushed against Ronnie’s throat. She seems wet, her clothes dripping, saturated, as if she’d been caught far from shelter, in some expansive field, as the sky opened and a torrent of water poured down. But Flynn knows it’s not water. From ten, fifteen feet away, he can smell the fumes of gasoline.

Between them, in the center of the roof, there’s a full puddle of oily liquid, a minature shiny lake glinting slightly in the moonlight. Flynn looks up from the puddle to Ronnie, watches as the man chucks Ronnie under the chin with the gun barrel a few times. There’s a minute of silence except for the sound of wind cutting across the roof, broken by chimneys and a smokestack.

“You’re Speer,” Flynn shouts.

Speer gives an exaggerated nod. “Thanks for joining us, Mr. Flynn. We won’t be needing this anymore,” and he throws the white microphone off the roof.

“So take me,” Flynn says. “Let her go.”

Speer ignores the suggestion with a mock-amused turn of his head.

“Move out of the doorway,” Speer yells, and points with the gun to the edge of the roof.

Flynn keeps his eyes on Ronnie and moves toward the small parapet of brick and capstones.

Speer starts to poke around in his windbreaker pocket with his newly freed hand. Ronnie squirms a bit, gets jabbed in the neck with the gun barrel, and goes quiet again. Speer pivots and pushes Ronnie down to her knees. He’s holding her by a clump of her wet hair balled in his fist and he uses his grip to start pushing and prodding her toward the gas puddle. Ronnie starts to scream and Speer releases her hair and shoves her forward into the puddle. He plants a foot on the small of her back, stares across the roof to Flynn and pulls from his pocket a small silver cigarette lighter that he proceeds to hold up, out in the air, away from his body.

“Terrible about the midget. Or, I’m sorry, the dwarf. Browning was a dwarf, right? They’re so sensitive about those things. You all are. That semantic shit.”

Ronnie stares out at Flynn but doesn’t say a word.

“I hope I’ll be able to bring the news to the widow,” Speer says. “You know, once she’s out of that hospital, she’ll need some consoling. Don’t you think, Mr. Flynn?”

“What do you want me to do?” Flynn asks.

Speer seems to ignore him. He gives a tug on Ronnie’s hair and says, “Going to put an end to all this jamming nonsense today, Mr. Flynn.”

Ronnie’s head jerks with the movement of Speer’s hand. He rolls her skull in a slow circle, manipulating her like a puppet and seemingly enjoying the action to the point where Flynn can see him biting off a huge grin.

“You know how we’re going to do that, Mr. Flynn? Same way you kill a snake. You cut off the head. You separate the head from the body, that snake is dead. I know. I’ve killed a good many snakes, Mr. Flynn. How ’bout you, now? You ever kill a snake, Mr. Flynn?”

“You want this to be a one-sided conversation, son? That’s not like you, is it? You’re known for your way with words, aren’t you there, son?”

Speer’s voice has taken on this strange southern accent, almost a bad Lyndon Johnson imitation. He goes on without waiting for an answer. “I want to mention again what a beautiful office you got there, Mr. Flynn. I got a look at it the other day when the midget and I got together. Really something. I’d think a man like you, with your beautiful office and your beautiful suits and your beautiful girlfriend, I’d think you’d have enough to keep you busy.”

They stare at each other and for a long moment the only sound is the wind cutting across the rooftop.

“But I guess the fact is,” says Speer, the voice now void of any play, all edgy and horribly slow, “you’re just one more stupid little prick. One more insolent little fucker who thinks he can screw with the natural order of things. What a fucking ego you must have, Flynn. You little anarchist scumbag”—the voice in full yell now—“you filthy little subversive.” And now a scream. “You pathetic little son of a bitch, thinking you can fuck around with the law, with the natural order of things,” and he throws Ronnie down to the asphalt and plants a foot on her back.

“Ronnie,” Flynn yells, absolutely helpless, the back of his throat burning. “For Christ sake, let her go. She hasn’t done anything.”

Speer bites in on his bottom lip, snorts air through a clogged nose, brings his voice back down a bit.

“Hasn’t done anything? First of all, Mr. Flynn, she’s got a filthy goddamned mouth. And second, she’s got your stench all over her.”

“Ronnie,” Flynn says, the word detached from anything but panic.

“You know, Wallace and the others, your friend Hazel there and the rest, when you take a good look, they’re really pretty pathetic creatures. Look at those lives. You know what I’m saying. Even Wallace, who tried so damn hard to fit in and get with the program. I mean he couldn’t change his stature, could he? In the end he was always going to be this low-to-the-ground dwarf. And the rest of them barely even tried to be normal. They just cashed it in at the start. Lived for this goddamn place. But you, you’re not pathetic, Mr. Flynn. You’re not pitiable. No, sir. You’re despicable. There’s a huge difference. The reason you’re despicable is that it didn’t have to be this way for you. You made it this way. You chose this way. You weren’t a dwarf. You weren’t some goddamn punk woman. I’ll bet your little friend Wallace would have given anything to be like you. But there’s no way to ask him now.”

He stops for a second to rub a hand over the bristle of his skull. “You’re a real piece of work, Flynn. Classic smart-ass troublemaker. Guys like you”—there’s movement, some pressure is applied to Ronnie’s back and she yelps and squirms—“you’re not stupid. That’s never the trouble with assholes like you. You’re just deviant. You use your goddamn, God-given intelligence for aberrant behavior. And you always rope other people in.”

Speer flips the hinged cover of the lighter open with a toss and uses his thumb to strike up a flame. Flynn flinches badly and his heart punches inside his chest.

“And now it’s time to put things right. First you’re going to watch this filthy bitch burn, Flynn. And then I’m going to tear you in half.”

Then there’s gunfire. Two shots. One knocks Speer backward and Ronnie, screaming, starts to crawl, kicking out legs, pulling with her arms, hysterical noises barking from her throat. Flynn runs to her, goes to the ground, pulls her into him, touching her back and head, unsure if she’s hit.

Speer rolls on one side and fires toward the doorway. Flynn looks to see Hannah Shaw squatting down, her arms extended in a shooter’s stance, returning fire. Speer takes a hit in the chest, another in the neck. He heaves and rolls on his back and his arm jerks upward but falls back on top of himself. Blood starts to erupt from the neck wound. Flynn watches his mouth go into spasm, jerking open and closed but emitting no sound.

He turns to see Hannah running toward him, her gun still trained on Speer. She looks odd, like some younger version of a face Flynn used to know. She gives a quick look at him, turns her attention back to Speer, and brings the gun down again, sighting in on the head. Speer is making horrible gurgling sounds now, dying too slowly. Hannah walks forward, a slow arcing line, side steps. She goes in slowly, brings a knee down on Speer’s darkening chest, releases one hand from the gun grip, still pointing the gun to the forehead. She reaches in delicately to the throat, extends fingers looking for a sign of pulse, waits several beats, then rises up off the chest and pulls the gun from the dying hands.

Ronnie has stopped screaming but she’s quaking in Flynn’s arms.

Hannah looks at the two of them, compressed into a vibrating pile. She swallows and says, “You take her down to your car and you drive out of here.”

Flynn doesn’t move or speak, just stares at her and shakes his head, first yes then no.

In the same even, horribly restrained tone, Hannah says, “Just get out. We have a mutual friend who would want it this way.”

She watches as her words sink in. Then Flynn is pulling up to his feet, hauling Ronnie with him, steering to the doorway.

* * *

Hannah waits until they’re out of sight.

Then she begins to do everything wrong. She wants to believe she’s acting on instinct, but what’s compelling her is a force with an unknown name, a motivation so new or so buried that it has no common label, no definition in the average heart.

She holsters her gun, then takes Speer by his long arms and drags him into the center of the gasoline puddle. She deposits him there, his belly wading in an inch of liquid, then she manipulates his wrists and awkwardly rolls him from stomach to back to stomach. She lets the arms drop to the ground, takes a breath, and looks out over the city, a hilly skyline of highway, a few modest high-rises, and dozens of pockets of manmade light.

Then she squats back down, reaches into Speer’s back pants pocket, and extracts a starched white handkerchief, perfectly folded and creased. She shakes it loose, soaks it in gasoline, brings it up to the head, and wipes furiously, a new mother dedicated to cleansing every inch of soiled skin on her overgrown, mutant child.

She wishes the gurgling noise would stop or the eyes would close. She turns the head to the side slightly, opens the mouth with her fingers, and jams the sopping rag inside until only a few stray corners protrude, little flags of futile surrender.

Hannah stands up and walks a circle around Speer. His eyes look up at her, blink once. She feels dizzy with the smell of the gasoline. She reaches into her jacket and pulls out a book of matches. She looks at them for a second, a cheap green-covered pack with a line drawing of a lunch car on the front flap and the words Uncle Elmore’s Rib Room beneath it.

She pulls free a stubby match with a small, crusty white head. She closes the book, tucks the front flap, turns the book over. She strikes the match and nothing happens. She strikes again. A small flame lights and grows and flickers. She cups it from the wind, squats again, drops it on the head, and steps back.

There’s an elongated second of pure waiting. Then the catching, the spurt of flame, the furious run of heat and light.

She stands and stares as the fire continues to grow and feed on the chemical-soaked bundle. It’s a funeral pyre. Like something out of history. Like something imported from an ancient, foreign culture. From a community with a love of cleansing and ritual and finality. From a clan with no confusion or doubt in the persistence of mortality and decay.

From some distant people who always know when the end has arrived.

44

Hazel sits in the very last seat of the bus, her army duffel bag filled to bursting with every secondhand possession she’s ever owned. She’s got the bag propped up against the window and is using it as both a pillow and insulation from the wind that’s blowing through a crack in the pane. She’s trying too hard to sleep and not succeeding. She’s trying not to think about the slight motion sickness that keeps loitering around the edges of her stomach.

She’s an hour outside of Quinsigamond and headed west, she thinks, in the general direction of Chicago. Three hours ago, she was sitting in her usual booth in the Rib Room, drinking the last coffee she’ll ever share with Elmore Orsi. Neither one of them spoke, but when Hazel drained her mug, Elmore handed her a white envelope that contained three thousand dollars and an all-route, coast-to-coast bus pass that doesn’t expire for a year.

She tried to push it back at him, but Elmore shook his head and gave a smile and said simply, “It’s not from me. I found it in one of the back booths after I locked up.”

There was no postmark on the envelope, just Hazel’s name typed in capital letters. She’s surprised how little she cares about knowing who sent the money and the pass. She could name some likely candidates, but she chooses not to. She had planned on leaving at dawn anyway and the envelope simply steered her toward the Greyhound station.

She pulls her feet up onto her seat, pulls her knees up into her chest, and wraps her arms around herself. With one hand, she reaches up to her ear and secures the small pink earphone that’s plugged into the old transistor radio in her jacket pocket. Of course it’s tuned to WQSG. But it’s only a matter of time and distance until she loses the signal and has to pull in something new.

From the sound of things, the Rib Room is buzzing, filled with people and noise and equipment. Ray Todd is broadcasting a special edition of City Soapbox on location from the diner. “Behind the lines, in the heart of enemy territory,” as he calls it. Ray is in rare form, as if the tension of being surrounded by all this mutual hatred and suspicion has elevated his talents to new heights, given him abilities he’d never known before. Even his voice has mutated a bit, taken on this Cronkite-style low rumble which infuses his subject matter with more importance than it deserves. After all, Hazel thinks, this wasn’t a moon walk or a presidential assassination. It was simply a lesson in stupidity and vanity. In the cost of having a family.

She closes her eyes, lets her body rock with the motion of the bus, and, in spite of herself, begins to listen and picture the scene.

If you’ve just joined us, we’re broadcasting live from the Canal Zone in a special report concerning the events of the last twenty-four hours. As most of you know, an anonymous telephone call early yesterday morning led a team of explosives specialists to the WQSG transmitting antenna and support tower. The tower, located on Devlin Hill at the northern border of the city, was apparently wired with what at first appeared to be plastique explosive. An unnamed officer on the scene later acknowledged, however, that the substance and device found on the radio tower “couldn’t have blown a gym locker. Either,” he said, “it was a bad prank or these people are genuine idiots.” Sources within the police department confirmed an anonymous telephone call from an individual who said that “a blow is about to be struck by the forces of anarchy. We’re through joking.” Police refused to disclose whether the caller was male or female …

Hazel can picture Ray, his studio set up in the extra-large “family” booth at the front of the lunch car and a host of slightly confused but intrigued Zone regulars crowding around the table, jockeying for position with Ray’s fans and assorted QSG staff. In the middle of it all, Elmore Orsi is bringing mugs of coffee and platters of Danish, whistling and bantering as he runs a gauntlet of bodies and power cables.

Apparently, Ray has a three-way phone hookup going. He’s interviewing both Chief Bendix and City Manager Kenner, prodding them both, trying to invoke a little name-calling and character-bashing.

CHIEF BENDIX: I want to be clear that we’re treating this as a genuine bombing attempt, an act of wanton terrorism, if you will. Due to the grace of God and the talent of our Commonwealth’s elite bomb squad, we were able to avert hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of destruction. It wouldn’t be prudent to disclose anything more at this point, until we’ve had a chance to assimilate all the information ourselves—

MANAGER KENNER [interrupting]: For God’s sake, Chief, people within your own department say the tower was never in any danger. One of my sources called the incident “Mickey Mouse shenanigans”—

RAY [interrupting]: Chief, isn’t it true the attempted bombing is rumored to be the work of a splinter group recently separated from local “jammers” who congregate right here, in this bohemian collective they call the Canal Zone?

[A chorus of boos and hisses from the crowd]

CHIEF BENDIX: Let me say that we already have people in this general neighborhood, yes. At this stage they’re just asking questions, talking to the locals. This should not be construed as any centralized harassment. We’re operating on information that’s been supplied to us by reliable sources—

[“Nazi scum,” someone in the crowd yells, and is drowned out by cheers]

RAY: Oh, the artistes are restless today. Nothing like a little criminal anarchy to get their thirst for chaos up. Get your hand off that cable, lady jane. Go ahead and scream, you spoiled little heathens. I want this once-great city to know the sound of its coming demise. I want the people to hear what the harvest of their complacency and apathy sounds like. I want them to hear the spawns of their own weak loins.

[“Up yours, Raymie,” another voice yells, followed by an explosion of laughter and whistles]

RAY: I’m surprised you’re all so jovial in light of the fact that your craven leaders have turned tail and run off. I should mention, again for our uninformed listeners, sometime after that anonymous phone call to the police, a “jamming” broadcast was picked up in the frequency range normally used by WQSG. Again, the jammers claimed to be the now legendary O’ZBON, or O’Zebedee Brothers Outlaw Network. In an odd and somewhat disjointed broadcast, the jammers lashed out at their once-loyal supporters, claiming their authenticity had been questioned since their return to Quinsigamond and stating that an abundance of inner squabbling had grown within the jamming community. After expressing their disappointment, the alleged brothers, who refer to themselves as James and John, stated their intention to leave the city once again. Let me ask you, Chief Bendix, do you believe these O’ZBON people are responsible for the attempted destruction of the WQSG tower?

CHIEF BENDIX: I think it’s just too early to tell. Remember, we’ve been after these O’ZBON characters for a while now on the broadcast disruption charges. It’s possible we’re entering a whole new ball game now. This may signal a whole new level of crime. We’ve all crossed into new territory …

Isn’t that the goddamned truth, Chief. Hazel opens her eyes and stares out the window at the blast-cut granite mounds that line the sides of the interstate. As she shifts in her seat, Gabe, sleeping like a puppy, falls sideways until his head is nuzzled on her chest. Hazel lifts her hand to push him off, then hesitates, instead softly runs her fingers through the hair on the crown of his head. What the hell, she thinks, leans forward, and kisses the boy without waking him.

New goddamn territory. Real frontier. I should’ve headed south. Someplace warm. Like the desert. No people. Just the sun and all those hard-ass reptiles. Snakes and lizards …

Goddamn you, Flynn. I didn’t want to be your daughter. You incestuous bastard. You ignorant fuck. I wanted you in ways you never considered.

And goddamn you, Gabe. I didn’t want to be your mother.

And now I just want to be alone for a long time. I just want to stay dry and quiet. Sink into the sand somewhere and let the sun bake me. No people. No bodies. Just the sound of the dry wind at night. No voices.

The QSG transmission starts to break up a little, the first cracks of static start to erupt in her ear. But she leaves the ear-piece plugged in, and in the intermittent clarity she can make out some commotion back at the Rib Room. There’s a disruption, a lot of background voices yelling until one makes its way to the microphone and becomes distinct.

… I’m sorry, I can’t keep quiet any longer. Don’t give me that look, you buffone. I haven’t even charged you for the coffee. Now, let’s be sane about this, people, huh, okay? James and John would not pull this kind of stunt. It’s not their style. I know the brothers, okay, all right? I know what I’m talking about here. They’re broadcasters, not dynamiters. They want the noise of words, not bombs. This isn’t their signature. It’s not the way they do business.

Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, the voice you’re hearing belongs to the proprietor of the Rib Room, Mr. Elmore Orsi. And just what is it you want to tell us, Mr. Orsi? That the attempted sabotaging of some very expensive property owned by my station was a joke? Little prank, perhaps? Is that it?

Well, yeah, maybe it was all a joke and maybe not. I just think the whole jamming gig is over. And it’s all a godawful shame, really.

[in a mocking tone] A shame, is it?

Things were exciting there, for a time. A real festive feel for a while there. Seemed like new things were happening. But you can’t change human nature. Everyone’s bound to take things one step over their particular line. And then the whole party’s over before you even know you’re wet. What the hell. Now even the brothers, or whoever they were, now they’re gone too. Everyone moves on sooner or later. But it was juice for a while there. A little secret family moving in the shadows, pulling their little pranks. The shame is, I think it was all just a swing against boredom more than anything else. But hell, like they say, it’s time to call it a day. Change is a staple no matter what circle you run in. I’ve seen a lot happen, okay, I’ve seen quite a few come and go. The O’ZBON boys were special. It’s just something you feel. It’s too bad the comeback didn’t work out. But something’s either meant to be or it isn’t, you know? And in the end, you just move on. It’s like that singer said — that English kid with the glasses — he said, radio is a sad salvation.

45

Hannah sits in the rear of Propa Gramma and runs her fingers lightly along her temples. The club is dark and crowded. The walls look as if they’re hung with tar paper. The ceiling feels too low and Hannah doubts there’s an adequate fire exit.

Up on a miniature stage, a trio of women, two black and one Latin-looking, all just slightly younger than Hannah, are performing. They call their group Simone’s Demons and they all wear these black-on-black wigs that are swirled and pinned down in a modified mini-bun near the back of their skulls. They dress in black wool turtleneck sweaters, matching black pleated skirts that hang below their knees, and white felt berets with tiny wicklike stems jutting out on the top.

They aren’t playing any instruments. There appears to be a prerecorded sound track and one of the women stands behind a mixing board and alters the music, slows it down, speeds it up, makes it jump and skip and fluctuate in volume.

The other two women are the singers, but to Hannah they look more like some art-world parody of the old film clips that show Hitler addressing huge rallies, screaming propaganda until it looks as if his voice will rupture.

The women raise their arms in a series of strange, aggressive salutes. Occasionally they do a synchronized dance step. Mostly, they yell a barrage of hard-to-hear, one-tone invectives, little blasts of rhyme, mostly verbs, an occasional noun.

The harder Hannah tries to follow the message, the more lost she becomes. So after a minute, she just lets it wash over her, like rough water. Usually, she can pick out the last word of each phrase, the word they put all their emphasis and accents on—protect, respect, reject, neglect, correct, suspect, detect, aspect, reflect, direct, deflect, insect …

She knows she needs to call in and request assistance from Lieutenant Miskewitz. She knows she needs to make a simple physical move, to grasp a phone and dial a number. To bring in air and emit sound and let common words fall off her tongue.

Instead, she reaches to her lap and pulls up the brown padded mailing envelope. She reaches inside and withdraws Lenore Thomas’s notebook, this bible of madness, transcribed by the strongest casualty Hannah will ever know.

She knows she shouldn’t read it. She knows the worst thing she can do is finish the letter, that her only hope is to burn the notebook in one more fire. But there’s a point in every common human life where the will runs dry and even the faintest vestige of strength has been depleted. We give that moment names of justification. But our naming will never stop us from hitting bottom and losing ourselves, losing the conception of hope, the imagined idea of what life could become.

I’m not myself anymore. But I’m not quite you either, Lenore. I’m left in between. Ready to fade.

She opens the notebook and picks up where she left off.

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 being a mystic so deluged with undercurrent and chaotic input that paranoia evolves from neurosis to cosmology?

Be patient. Like me, you’ll start to lose that righteous grip on rationality, my young sister. My sweet Hannah. And you’ll start to dwell on that opaque, other realm— Mystery. (And by this I do not mean the occult.) I mean that dogma where the only pattern appears to be chaos. Where the only consistency appears to be randomness. Where everything is secret and where the connections come apart as soon as they are known.

I mean the place where I live now, Hannah.

Let’s guess what’s going through your head just now. You’re thinking I’ve hopped lanes, traded one rush for another, swapped my much-loved crank for antique acid. Sorry, that would be one more easy solution. And we both know, I pray, no, I trust, no, no, I guess, by now, we all know that life just won’t work that way. The fact is, my new addiction isn’t chemical at all. My new monkey is something so much stronger than meth or dust. Are you ready, Hannah? I’m mainlining Hidden Signs. Buried Signals. Coded Messages. I’m completely dominated by that whole subsurface reality that the brutal majority will not acknowledge, where every billboard is an endless bible of interpretations, where every lunch menu is a heinous political creed, where every boring phone conversation is a rape of multiple meanings, and always, always, malignant intent. There is a world beneath Quinsigamond, Hannah. And probably a world beneath that world. The year you’ve spent down Bangkok has to have changed you and hinted at this fact. I suspect you are beginning to think of yourself as a bar of iron. But even iron will melt at some ridiculously high temperature. Are your dreams starting to trouble you? Do you feel like there’s something radically wrong with your digestive process? Has your period been irregular for the past six months or so? You can ignore the symptoms if you choose, little sister. This virus will not go away. As an infected patient, I can attest to its persistence. And there’s worse to come. Your actions become uncontrolled — last summer I found myself mailing long letters, like this one, addressed only to:

General Delivery

The Andes Mountains

Argentina, South America

But so what? So my gospel sits in some dead-letter office, in some tiny valley village at the foot of a massive mountainside. There are some things we simply need to do. Movement for movement’s sake. It’s a way of advancing toward a resolution, a way of killing time until the Aliens show their faces. Already, I’m getting better.

But if you still choose to think I’ve lost touch, little sister, the loss, of course, is yours. Because, please, make no mistake in this one regard: things are falling apart at every possible seam. And into this breach of disorder and chaos, another putrid god is slouching for Q-town. But you have this promise, Hannah, when the beast comes, Lenore will be back to greet the little shit.

Hannah’s head begins to throb and she closes the notebook. And then someone is sliding a shot glass in front of her. It’s filled with a clear liquid. Hannah looks up to see Jerome LaCroix in his white silk shirt, opened to his navel, in his toreador pants with the gold brocade down the sides, up high on his two-inch heels, hands elegantly on his hips and a trace of a smile playing on his mouth.

“Girl, you just looked like you could use something,” he says.

Hannah picks up the shooter and holds it near her eye, looking through it as if it were some tool of science. She sniffs at it, but there’s no distinct odor, or rather there’s an abundance of odors, but none she can specify and put a name to.

She looks up at Jerome and manages to say, “I really shouldn’t. I might be pregnant.”

Jerome brings a flat hand up to his mouth to convey a mock sense of shock. Then he shakes his head and says, “Might do the child all sorts of good. It’s medicinal, you know. My own mother took it, in moderation of course, all the while she was carrying me.”

Hannah nods at him, not listening, then raises the glass slightly, clears her throat, brings the shooter to her lips, and says, “To my sister, who recently passed on.”