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“But he’s credible?”

“He knows his Elvis trivia, but so do thousands of Elvis fans. I pick up a genuine confusion. He may have absorbed some of Elvis’s characteristics from sheer obsession. Has he really ‘become’ Elvis? It’s easier to believe that than that the real Elvis could have lived and hidden out so successfully all these years.”

“So he’s credible.”

“Yeah. As credible as a voice over the airwaves can ever be.”

“Interesting.”

“How will you get the tapes?”

“Someone will pick them up after the show tonight. You have your post-game groupies. One will ask you tosign a tote bag; you can slip the tapes in there.”

“Big Brother’s been watching me? This that urgent, and that covert?”

“Always, Matt. Always. Elvis mania may be good for a laugh, but we’ve got some grim business going on here.”

“FBI business.”

“You said that. Talk to you later, if I get time before I leave town.”

A brisk good-bye ended the exchange.

Puzzled, Matt dialed the station and got Dwight, technician and jack of all trades. His request for tapes was met with a belly laugh.

“You and two hundred others. Leticia’s working up a sales program, but I’ll run you some free. You want more than one set?”

“Yeah. Give me … three?”

“Fine. Freebies for you, but Leticia’s thinking twenty-nine ninety-five for the public.”

“Can you do that, without the caller’s permission? Without mine, for that matter?”

“What’s to object about? Anyone could have taped you guys from the air. And by calling in, these folks put themselves into a public arena.”

“I’d have a lawyer check it anyway.”

“Leticia will. She doesn’t let much get past her. Including gold mines.”

“What a wimp,” the caller said. “Holing up in his bedroom like a spoiled kid just because the world wants too much. If he had any guts he’d come out of hiding.”

“Why are you so angry?”

“Because if he really was the King, he wouldn’t have left us like he did, and if he did survive and go into hiding, then he cheated us another way.”

“It’s not like you owned him.”

“Yeah, we did. We made him.”

“A bunch of things made him … the music, the times, his own instincts, all the people who cried ‘lewd’ and made him notorious, all the people his death shocked into an orgy of mourning. But I don’t think he owed you anything. He had a right to just stop.”

Another voice had taken the airwaves. “That man is wrong. We didn’t just make Elvis, we made him sick. We made him stand in for our sense of rebellion and freedom and wanting to live so high we’d be legends. He was our … what do you call it?”

“Scapegoat?” Matt suggested.

“Standin,” another male voice said. “She had it right. He was our standin. But he’s gone, and we don’t need to listen to any version of him asking for answers on the radio. We don’t need standins anymore. You fans who won’t get over it, get a life!”

The debate was high-octane tonight.

“Couldn’t you tell the poor man is just looking for peace, whoever he is?” The woman’s voice was teary. “We can give it to him if we just stop expecting him to be anything any more, even alive. That was so sad, Mr. Midnight. What Elvis said last night. I hope he’s all right now.”

“He’s all right, mama. He’s probably calling in from some money-laundering island in the Caribbean, laughing at how gullible we all are. He’s probably got a secret deal with the estate to stay dead, so they can milk his image better. Who wants to see Elvis a senior citizen? I hope you radio people expose the bastard who’s been pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes. If he comes on again, I dare you to let me ask him a few questions.”

“You’d scare him away! You probably already have. Guys like you were just jealous of Elvis.”

Matt was playing referee tonight. He hardly had to put a word in as Leticia conducted the bristling switchboard like a bandleader.

He sat there, listening, exhausted by the strong feelings pro and con the topic of Elvis raised, growing more concerned that this outbreak of emotion would driveaway the one man who really needed to get on the line: the supposed Elvis himself.

These calls had always come independently of whoever else was calling in and what they were saying. Elvis seemed cocooned in his own world, musing in a sometimes laid-back, sometimes manic monologue. Matt almost got the impression that he didn’t listen to the radio show at all, that he just dialed during the proper hour and connected.

Two isolated men, talking, with the world listening in. And the FBI.

Matt shifted in his seat, interrupting a denouncement of rock ‘n’ roll music. “The music can’t talk back. And neither can Elvis.”

“Yes, he can!” the next caller argued. “He’s been talking here.”

“We don’t know who that is. Was,” Matt said, suddenly sure. “I don’t think whoever he was will be calling in again.”

“Why, is his contract up?” a snide-sounding man demanded.

“I think he’s shared as much of himself as he’s going to. Didn’t you notice his call last night had a . final … air to it?”

“Aw, he won’t ever go away, not really.” The woman sounded more anxious than certain. “You can’t mean that was it. That he’ll just stop.”

“He did before.”

But the calls didn’t stop. Someone even asked everyone not to call in, “so that the King could get through.”

Matt smiled to see Leticia’s face solidifying into horror on the other side of the glass barrier. Nobody wanted Elvis to stop calling.

Except Matt.

“It’s over,” he said, voicing his thoughts.

The big hand on the schoolhouse clock sliced the line that stood for twelve fifty-nine. The roulette wheel of time was running out tonight, and even Leticia’s willingness to let the show run overtime meant nothing if the main attraction failed to show.

“He’s skipped a night before,” a woman’s thin voice pointed out just as the minute hand clicked into place on high noon, or high midnight.

Matt heard his rush of closing words. Thanksforcalling, we’llhavetowaitandsee. Waitandsee.

Reluctantly, Leticia’s falling hand cued Dwight to run the scheduled ad.

Matt pulled off the headphones before he could hear some inane jingle for a furniture rental place or a car dealership or a Laundromat. Advertisers at the midnight hour expected a young and restless audience in need of credit and consumer goods. What a role model Elvis was for them.

“Sorry,” Leticia told him on the way out.

He didn’t want to admit that he wasn’t sorry.

Maybe his long session last night had exorcised Elvis. He hoped so.

The group outside was bigger than ever, up to nine people. All women.

“He didn’t call us,” one wailed as soon as she saw him.

“Don’t take it personally. If he’s standing anybody up, it’s me.”

“Nobody would stand you up, Mr. Midnight.”

Matt stared, nonplussed, into devoted eyes that would look right on a basset hound.

“How did you all get here so fast?” he wondered aloud.

“We came early and listened on the car radio,” a pair of plump night-shift nurses said, almost as one, proud of their initiative.

“Maybe he’ll call tomorrow.” Another woman handed him the usual photograph to sign.

Leticia had given him a pen that wrote in silver, so it would show up on the photo’s darker surfaces. She had a whole box of the things, brand-new, and had beamedlike Santa Claus bestowing an electric train instead of a producer anticipating many nights of numbing ritual outside the radio station door that would soon become tiring and then an imposition.