Jack O'Connell - Wireless

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not even to see her brother?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

And Welby goes into his gavel-banging mode.

Flynn touches Hannah’s arm.

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

Hannah gives him a shrug.

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

“She have a name?” Hannah asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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