Jack O'Connell - Wireless

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

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 Or do you quickly become immune to the out-of-date grandeur?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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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